who has files open on a linux server

Question

I have the fairly common task of finding who has files open on our Linux (Ubuntu ) file server in our Windows environment.

We use Samba on the network and I use Putty from my workstation to establish a shell window to run bash scripts.

I have been using something like this to find what files are open: (this returns a list of process ids with each open file)

Robert:$ sudo lsof | grep "/srv/office/some/folder"

Then, I follow up with something like this to show who owns the process: (this returns the name of the machine on the network using the IP4 protocol who owns the process)

Robert:$ sudo lsof -p 27295 | grep "IPv4"

Now I know the windows client who has a file open and can take action from there.

As you can tell this is not difficult but time consuming. I would prefer to have a windows application I can run that would just give me what I want.

So, I have been thinking about creating some process I can run on Linux that listens on a port and then returns a clean list of all open files with the IP address of the host who has the file open. Then, a small windows client application that can send the request on the port.

It seems like this should be a very common need but I can not find anything like this that has been done before.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

I. If you need to do that task on just one computer - I would do that this way:

1. Create linux account for such tasks ("sambaadmin" for example), for better security
2. Configure putty for automatic login on that account

3. Write your script that does your admin tasks (/home/sambaadmin/see_clients.sh for example). I would do your tasks this way:

   smbstatus -p read -p "Press [Enter] to exit..." exit

4. Add execute permissions to it (chmod +x /home/sambaadmin/see_clients.sh)

5. Call this script at the end of /home/sambaadmin/.bash_profile file. .bash_profile is automatically executed after user login.

6. Create putty shoutcut on your windows desktop for that automatic login session

After you do that - your shourtuc will open putty, log in, your "admin task script " will be executed, you will see it in putty window and after you press Enter - session will end.

II. If you use many computers in company - write simple web application in python or use some server web management software (Webmin for example).

III. You can use cron to execute every minute or two script like this:

smbstatus -p > /somewhere/sambashare/openfiles.txt

You can make shortcut to that file in windows and just open it to see what is going on.

\\sambaserver\sambashare\openfiles.txt