[gvfs] [smb] OpenOffice isn't integrated with gnome-keyring

[Thomas Novin]

I think that enabling gio for OOo 3.0.0 may correct this, but it is currently broken and there is no support in the OOo gio patch for locking files.

===

When I open a document over a password protected samba share with OpenOffice I get a ugly popup asking me for username and password, even though I have stored this combination in my keyring. If I open a textfile with gedit for instance, instead I once get a question about letting gedit use my keyring.

Version 2.4.0-3ubuntu6

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 8.04
Release: 8.04

[Peter Kerekfy (kerekfyp)]

I confirm this on Hardy.

(It is quite annoying to enter my password after each login.)

[Pablo Castellano (pablocastellano)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Can you try with latest Ubuntu release? Thanks in advance.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Absolutely. I tested in Intrepid just now (versions below). Exact steps to reproduce:

1. Connect to a Samba-server via Nautilus.
2. Access a share. When asked for user/pass, save the credentials for ever.
3. Open a DOC/XLS document from that share.

You will now get a question from OpenOffice. If you don't enter anything, you will get 'General Internet Error has occured'

$ apt-cache policy openoffice.org-base-core
openoffice.org-base-core:
  Installed: 1:2.4.1-9ubuntu2
  Candidate: 1:2.4.1-9ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 1:2.4.1-9ubuntu2 0
        500 http://se.archive.ubuntu.com intrepid/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

I can't say that I agree that this bug should be status Wishlist. This should be a bug of at least medium importance IMHO.

[Kjell Braden (afflux)]

It does not qualify for anything higher than wishlist as it
1.) is a request for a feature that has never existed and
2.) is only an "annoying" issue which can easily be worked around by just entering the password in the dialog.

[Daniel Nowak (lowlyocean)]

Kjell Braden, I disagree. This problem is very troublesome; I am unable to access any Word-created documents or Excel-created spreadsheets hosted on a Windows XP share from my laptop running OpenOffice+Ubuntu. I cannot exactly just "work around" by typing in the password because the domain name is locked, and it does not match the domain that I am working in. Thus, I have to download the file onto my desktop, modify it, and upload it again - every time I want to make a change. As you can see from the attachment, OOo claims I am accessing a file in "WORKGROUP" but I am actually accessing it on a different domain.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Anonymous, I think you can specify domain\username in the user field. Can you try that?

[Kim d'Audretsch (kimda)]

I open files on samba shares all the time with openoffice. This issue is very serious and annoying for me since I have to enter password and username every time I open files from a samba share. Which is practically all the time.

Luckily I found another bug report with a temporary solution. The problem is that openoffice doesn't work very well with gvfs.

Change /usr/share/applications/ooo-*.desktop %U with %F so that it will use filesystem path instead of "virtual" (and thus use ~/.gvfs/).

Now I can open files through Nautilus in OOo without problem; I can save them without problem, so long I don't try to override them.

See also:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/openoffice.org/+bug/247485

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Thanks for the workaround. I did this to implement:

sudo -s
cd /usr/share/applications
for i in `ls ooo*.desktop`; do sed -i 's/\%U/\%F/' $i ; done

[Daniel Nowak (lowlyocean)]

Thomas, your solution with putting "domain\username" in the user field works, thank you! However, your very last suggestion above does not seem to work for me. There are no ooo*.desktop files in /usr/share/applications. This may be because I just performed the following:

sudo apt-get remove openoffice.org*

and installed the new OOo 3.0 .deb's from the OpenOffice.org website. (Ubuntu 8.04 repositories don't have the new OOo, and I wanted to see if this bug had been addressed for the new release.)

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Anonymous, remove that again and install the Ubuntu-debs for OOo 3.

Add this to the end of your /etc/apt/sources.list

#OpenOffice
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

..then 'aptitude update' and reinstall openoffice.

[mizzio (mizzio)]

Hello everybody,

In our office (ubuntu client - samba server for all the documents) we have been struggling for long time now with this bug, which is basically preventing us from working with the OO documents on the network shares. I have tried all the possibile solutions to get rid of the "general internet error" and the "password dialog" issue, but I'm still getting all the OO documents corrupted / not saved / not opened.

- hardy / intrepid -> same problem
- OO 2.3.x / OO 2.4.x / OO 3.0.x -> same problem
- sed -i 's/\%U/\%F/ -> same problem.

I'll be very glad to see a possible workaround for this !
mizzio

[Kim d'Audretsch (kimda)]

A temporary fix until the openoffice devs fixed this bug.

Use cifs mounts to mount the share directly.

Add an line to /etc/fstab to mount the samba share directly and you will not experience the problems caused by using gvfs.

Here's how:
Add a line for each share you want to open to the /etc/fstab file

Either like this:
//192.168.44.100/share_name /path_to/mount_point cifs username=server_user,password=server_password,_netdev,uid=client_username,gid=users 0 0

or use a .cred file to store your password/username like I did because you do not want readable in /etc/fstab

//192.168.44.100/share_name /path_to/mount_point cifs credentials=/path_to/.creds,_netdev,uid=client_username,gid=users 0 0

example of .cred file
username=myusername
password=mypassword

chmod 600 .cred to make it only readable to the fileowner.

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

I strongly agree with Thomas that this should not be a "wishlist" bug. Contrary to what Kjell said, for many of us there simply is no workaround that works (at least none of them have worked for me so far). This is not just an annoyance, because it prevents a user from saving any file over a network. If OpenOffice cannot work over a normal network, then it's a much less useful program to me. Often it even fails to open the file altogether, after that extra password dialog. The program should have basic network functionality, just as all the other programs that I use.

Sorry if I sound like I'm ranting, but this is such a serious bug, and it's been going on for several years now with no improvement.

[Phoenix (phoenix-dominion)]

Meanwhile, on Jaunty, when I open the document first time, it's read only.
The second time it opens read-write
But I can't save the document, as it throws an "General error". So that' s how daily work is

You navigate via nautilus to the file, try to open it, have to enter username password (meanwhile no longer required for me), naturaly try to edit the file, get the error, that the file is read-only, close, reopen the file, editing the file, naturaly try to save it, get the error, have to save it on desktop, after finishing (yes, I save my file regulary until I'm finished...) I have to point my nautilus to the desktop and move the file to the network location - now assume you do that 50 times a day. o(this is the point where I would regularly write in capital letters what PITA stands for....)

Folks, this is a serious bug - it can't be that I can't access a file over a mounted share like any other file - it's rubbish to argue that this is something like a "wish" to work as any other person on this planet does like clicking on the network based file, open it, modifying it and then safe it there without having to enter credentials every time, opening it twice and to save it on the desktop and then move it to it's original location.

If you don't understand the impact of this bug, then you don't use ubuntu to do daily work with documents in a more-then-just-having-files-on-the-local-harddisk basis.

cheers
Philipp

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

I believe the root cause of this bug is actually several bugs in gnome vfs. They are already known and filed with upstream Gnome VFS developers but have yet to be solved. Just one example of related bugs is that if you truncate a file on a gvfs fuse mount (eg ~/.gvfs/foo ) and then ask the size of the file you get back the size of the file from before it was truncated.

Chris

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Changing severity to medium although this won't have any real effect on when the bug is fixed since it appears to be upstream Gnome breakage in gvfs.

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

Please excuse my low level of expertise, but I've never understood why OpenOffice is the only program affected by this networking bug. The only reason I can think of is that OpenOffice is a bigger, more complex, full-featured program than any of the others -- so that it basically uses any given resource (network, memory, processor, etc.) more intensively than, say, Eye of Gnome or Totem Movie Player needs. But as I mentioned, OpenOffice has this same networking problem even in Windows XP. Is it possible that OpenOffice was never designed for network use? I'm confused.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Grashdur,

There may be bugs in both OOo and gvfs, but there are definitely known and easily reproduced bugs in gvfs that cause at least some of the problems related to network saving in OOo.

What kind of problems have you seen with OOo on XP? And do you happen to have any of the upstream bug numbers relating to those issues?

Thanks,

Chris

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

Hi Chris --

In Windows XP the problem is very similar: You don't get the extra
username/password dialog box like in Ubuntu, but what you see is the OO
Splashscreen -- and then after you wait a while, the program and file
both fail to open. And that's all -- no error messages come up. In
Windows there is a workaround: to "map a network drive." I haven't been
using Windows for a while now, so I'm not current on it now. Back when I
was using Windows, I tried to find and file bug reports but had no
success -- at the time I was having a lot of trouble with the OO
website, and pretty much gave up on it. Maybe it was just not compatible
with Firefox.

Kind Regards,

Scott

----- Original message -----
From: "Chris Cheney" <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:55:46 -0000
Subject: [Bug 229839] Re: [gvfs] [smb] OpenOffice isn't integrated with
gnome-keyring

Grashdur,

There may be bugs in both OOo and gvfs, but there are definitely known
and easily reproduced bugs in gvfs that cause at least some of the
problems related to network saving in OOo.

What kind of problems have you seen with OOo on XP? And do you happen to
have any of the upstream bug numbers relating to those issues?

Thanks,

Chris

--
[gvfs] [smb] OpenOffice isn't integrated with gnome-keyring
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/229839
You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
of the bug.
Scott Ellsworth // home phone: [phone] // Skype name: ellsworth3

[Phoenix (phoenix-dominion)]

Well, if you take a look at the file-size of OOO, which is depending on the platform, but WAY above 100MB, then I can figure why this fat piece of code doesn't fly....

Anyhow, the "map network drive" refers IIRC to map a drive letter to an UNC Path, that's:

X: points to \\myserver\myshare

So you actually don't "browse" the network and open it via something like in linux terms as smb://myserver/myshare/mydocument.odt, but as a semi-local thing like ~/.gvfs/myserver/myshare/mydocument.odt

It is well known, that those network paths break severeal applications, as they can't handle it....

Actually I can check, if OOO on XP will behave as noted here, and if time allows I will do so.

Out of frustration I checked out GNOME-Office again... at least file opening and saving works like a charm there :)

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

For anyone who can replicate these types of bugs on WinXP please report the bug to the official openoffice.org bug tracker at http://www.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi Whatever is causing the problem under XP may be part of the problem on Linux as well depending on where the bug lies. There are of course other issues with gvfs but they possibly could be minor issues if OOo's network file-handling is broken as well... Also if you want to test with the official OOo on Linux and report bugs to the same OOo bug tracker that would be helpful as well, as it is hard for me to reproduce these types of problems on my personal computer.

If you do report a bug at the official bug tracker regarding the issue please follow up to this bug report with the bug numbers.

Thanks!

Chris

[Phoenix (phoenix-dominion)]

On Windows XP with OOO 3 on a mapped network drive it works as expected, can't say for a UNC path as of now...

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

I just tried booting into Windows XP on my main computer, and opened an OO file that's located on my laptop (that's running Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex): I was able to save normally. So at least for me, it looks like the problem is gone now in Windows XP. (I used OO version 2.4, as that's what I still have for now in Windows.)

When I try opening an OO file on my laptop that's located on my main computer, I get the same error message when trying to save it, regardless of whether the host computer is running Win XP or Ubuntu Hardy Heron: "Error saving the document [filename]: Nonexistent file." That's followed by a second error message, "Error saving the document [filename]: General error. General input/output error."

I looked at the OpenOffice bug reports at the link you (Chris) gave. There seem to be quite a few bug reports of this problem of not being able to save files over a network, starting from June 2002 with StarOffice, continuing up to November 2008 in OpenOffice 3.0. That last bug, #95767, was solved by setting up the network to allow lock files to be saved. (I tried creating a file over the network with the name .~lock.myfilename# and it worked fine.) These various bug reports refer to Windows and Macintosh; none of them mention any problems on Linux.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

If you uninstall the openoffice.org-gnome package does it work better?

I think without the gvfs support in OOo that it will fall back to using Gnome gvfs fuse support, this potentially could work better if there are bugs in OOo gvfs support itself.

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

I tried that out: After uninstalling that package, the problem was worse. OO then fails to open files altogether -- after I click to open a file I just see the OO splashscreen, and then nothing happens. Or if the program is already open, then nothing happens at all.

So I reinstalled the package, and now it's like before: I can open a networked file, but I can't save one.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Ok, thanks for testing and letting me know, I'll try setting up a test smb server so I can try out a couple of other ideas I have that might help related to getting rid of gvfs support.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

Apparently samba is currently broken on Jaunty, is segfaults on start... :(

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

It still doesn't work for sftp but that may be related to the truncate issue, which is fixed in gvfs svn and will be in the next point release upload.

What I did to test it was change the %U to %F in the .desktop file to have Gnome use gvfs fuse to for the files.

[Chris Cheney (ccheney)]

I believe that this bug is essentially fixed in openoffice.org 1:3.0.1-5ubuntu1 in Jaunty as I have now turned off both gnome-vfs and gio in OOo. OOo is now patched to use gvfs fuse which should work. There are a few remaining bugs in gvfs fuse that cause saving not to work for ftp/webdav but those bugs are already filed in the gnome upstream bug tracker at:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574968
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=575150

Please let me know if this resolves your problem.

Thanks,

Chris Cheney

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

Not sure how soon I'll have a chance to set up Jaunty -- maybe in a few months. Will report on it when I do.

[Thomas Novin (thomasn80)]

Started up Jaunty in VirtualBox. Accessed the shares I usually have a problem opening documents from and I didn't get any popups/errors, the documents opened just fine.

I then repeated the same steps for my host system, Intrepid with the usual problems as result.

Conclusion: Seems to be fixed!

[Phoenix (phoenix-dominion)]

Just updated my jaunty and can confirm that it works for me! Great job guys!

[Grashdur (grashdur)]

I'll probably upgrade at least my notebook computer in the next couple weeks. Will this fix work just by installing Jaunty on the client computer, or do I also have to upgrade the host computer?