Office lock file problem

[Antonio_Fargas]

@ncw

Can you find out how it works?

actualy i don't understand why it is that hard for it to work...
maybe they are doing like i said above. exceptionaly upload the file (the lock file) when it is a file starting with ~$ and with the extension .xlsx/.xls/.xlsm/....

[Antonio_Fargas]

btw If you want to investigate you can take 2 licences, you'll have 7 days to check how it works, you can cancel your order immediatly, you'll not be debited.

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

i already signed up for the trial eariler today but cannot pick it apart until tomorrow.

[Antonio_Fargas]

you took a licence or you used the covid19 free session ? https://www.raidrive.com/together/covid-19

if i understand well you have all options enabled in Raidrive until saturday 31 october

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

i do not have covid so that does not apply to me.

i hope it does not apply to you...

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

in my testing, rclone does file locking and it works, but not well as compared to raidrive.

with rclone, there is a delay before rclone updates a mounted folder.

let's say i have two computers, comp01 and comp02

• both running rclone mount to the same remote.
• both computers are using openoffice,

on comp01

1. i open an existing file named test.odt
2. openoffice will create a temp file named .~lock.test.odt#

on comp02

1. i open test.odt
2. openoffice will look for that temp lock file.
3. rclone mount has not noticed that temp file yet, so openoffice will open that file.

the solution might be to add a few flags to the mount command.
--enable-file-locking=on|off
--file-locking-file-extensions=odt,doc
another flag with the regex format of each lock file.

1. when user tries to open a file test.odt, rclone would do an immediate query for .~lock.test.odt#.
2. if that file exists, make it appear in the mount before opening test.odt
3. as openoffice tries to open test.odt, it will see .~lock.test.odt# and complain.

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

@ncw, not sure you saw my post about implementing file locking?

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@asdffdsa

not sure you saw my post about implementing file locking?

Urgh, this is a difficult problem to solve. There are lots of different sorts of locks...

I think that reducing --dir-cache-time will help - that defines the opportunity time for locking to go wrong. So if you set --dir-cache-time to 15s then there is a 15s opportunity for things to go wrong. Another relevant parameter will be --vfs-write-back the time rclone waits for a file to be changed before uploading.

@asdffdsa

when user tries to open a file test.odt, rclone would do an immediate query for .~lock.test.odt#.

I wonder whether that would work - I suspect openoffice will have read the directory before trying to open the .odt file - that is how I'd program it.

I think what you'd want is if the program tried to stat or open or use in any way a file which might be a lock file .~lock.test.odt# then rclone would look through the cache to find it.

Note that this won't avoid the --vfs-write-back time delay though so you'd have to set that to 0.