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I have a Windows server with a file share accessed by a few Macs running 10.13 High Sierra and 10.14 Mojave. The Mojave Macs keep locking out every file they access on the SMB file share. So, the Mac user who opened the file can't save to the file (with a warning about the file being open and in use), nor can anyone else access the file (until the connection is force closed on the server side).

On High Sierra Macs, file handling over SMB appears to be normal with no lockout issues.

Because this is become such a chronic issue, I'm considering restoring the Mojave macs back to High Sierra. But before I do that, are there any other options that might address this issue?

Note that SMBv1 is disabled for security reasons, and is not a fallback option.

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I have this same issue. It seems to only be with Microsoft Office files. PDFs don't seem to have "permanent lock" issue. I don't know if it's a problem with the MacOS "dual fork" file structure fighting with the Microsoft temporary lock file.

I've re-pushed NTFS permissions down from the parent folder to see if that would resolve the creation/destruction of the temporary files. It works for a bit then the problem comes right back.

We have even had one file where all permissions were removed and even the SYSTEM user was unable to recover the permissions. I couldn't seize ownership with the GUI or any cmd commands. I had to restore the file from a backup.

Have you had any luck with this issue?

I've tested the glitch with a laptop that is running the same versions of MacOS and Office but have been unable to trigger the lock file issue.

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  • These users mainly work with MS office files, adobe suite apps, as well as standard PDF, jpg, png, and tiff files. However, the main problem is the adobe suite products--those also have a temp file like office documents do. I suspect it's not a server side issue, since Windows computers work fine and the high sierra macs are mostly fine. I think it might be the way SMB works in Mojave. Also, the finder view being used has an effect. If the high sierra is in the icon view, files get locked up like on mojave. However, in list view, the high sierra macs don't have file lock problems.
    – Force Flow
    Commented Jun 20, 2019 at 20:47
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We've faced this at my work as well, we noticed that Mojave machines would complain about "Write Access" not being granted, we went through using Full Control/Modify on our user's folder and it didn't resolve it.

We tried turning off thumbnails in Finder which also didn't do much in the way of it working, then finally we ran Handle which showed us when we were having the issue that there were 3 open handles to the file in question, when we closed Photoshop or whatever program all but 1 would be released, further digging just showed us that it was SYSTEM that had the file open so that didn't give us much to go off.

I've been watching the Apple Change Logs to see if they make any mention of SMB problems being fixed, but it seems like it's not moving forward. I'm sorry for not bringing a helpful answer but it hasn't fully fallen off our radar as we're wanting to go to Mojave as soon as we find something to fix this annoying issue.

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We don’t see this at all on thousands of Macs sharing via SMB of many vintages, most 2008 R2 and newer, but all manner of non windows servers exist in our environment in addition to windows server.

I wonder if the people having problems are binding their Macs to AD or just have permissions issues? Sorry to not have an answer, but we’re not changing anything out of the box and not seeing any issues like described. We do not bind and about 30% of our Macs use Apple a Enterprise Connect to generate Kerberos tickets, but that’s not needed to get things to work.

If every file gets locked, you can get a packet trace and work with IT / Microsoft / Apple to diagnose the issue in my experience if you can’t see the error debugging the packet traces.

Wireshark has very good tools to read in the files and filter to SMB traffic if needed. I will second the notion that list view is the best view since it minimizes quicklook preview load on the server and turning off .DS_Store files can reduce load on the servers even more. 

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool TRUE

The issue goes away when the file server can keep up with requests in our experience. There are things you can do client side to reduce the load, but even in a perfect situation, network drops can happen so you’ll need to reset permissions in those cases.

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