Comments on Samba: Working Around QuickBooks 2006 Incompatability

Thanks for this little how-to. It has some very good info on things to watch out for with QB on samba. Just wondering are you using any of the following directives on your quickbooks share?

create mask = 0666
force user = quickbooks # this is a really powerful option.
force create mode = 0666
directory mask = 0777
force directory mode = 0777

These might make your and your clients life easier.

Regards,

cooper

I have three machines with QB2006 installed. The two that have not had the any updates installed can connect to a Samba share. The one that is fully updated gives this message when attempting to connect to the Samba share:

"You are trying to create, open, or use a company file that is located on another computer. Your computer is set up to allow access to only those company files that are located on your computer"

GROAN!!! Why did Intuit mess up a decent product?

I found, with out making other changes to samba config, that I can get QuickBooks 2006 Pro to work in a multi user mode as outlined here:

http://www.quickbooks.com/support/faqs/qb2006/829e206e.html

Note: There simply has to be a user logged on to the server (not QB) that has owner permissions on the .qbw file AND has launched (but doesn't need to be running) QuickBooks in the alternate host mode described above.

Personal Note: Intuit may just like Microsoft a little too much :)

First of all, nice job on the article. As far as multi-user mode goes, this isn't just a problem with Quickbooks 2006, but really with many previous versions as well because of Quickbooks' means of locking the database or change control in multi-user mode. The answer to this is in disabling Samba's locking on that particular share. Try disabling oplocks on that share that you're using for the Quickbooks database in order to use the multi-user mode as this tells Samba not to worry about controlling access to this share in any way so that Quickbooks will handle access only. You could even specify the lack of oplocks for just the file and not the share in general by using the "veto oplock files = " option in smb.conf. This is the reason that Samba and Quickbooks aren't automatically compatible because Samba wants to control oplocking for performance reasons in a multi-user network. Anyways, hope this helps.

Cheers,

Kyle

Miami, FL

My company runs peachtree 2006 accounting software in network (multi-user) mode, with data files stored on a samba server. It works as well with Linux as it does with Windows. There are some lockup problems due to the Windows clients not releasing files after an app closes, but at least with samba you can close lingering connections from clients. This may not be an option for some due to corporate policy. However if you can change over, you will find fewer bugs and better support to boot. Cheers