File locking issues causing access to M: and S: drives

At the request of BSI, the 0500hrs daily restart of the protocol nodes has been modified to only happen on business days, Mon - Fri. This to allow a particular workstream to run for more than 24hrs at the weekends. Thus, errant file locks that occur on Fridays will now be cleared on Monday mornings at 0500hrs.

Yesterday's errant file locks were successfully cleared at 5am this morning, fyi.

Yesterday's errant file locks were successfully cleared at 5am this morning, fyi.

The restart of the protocol node services at 0500hrs this morning has been verified as successful. All file locks have been cleared. The M: and S: drives, and any NFS mounts, are available

We are acknowledging there has been considerable recent disruption due to the Samba file locking issue and access to the M: and S: drives. We apologise for this disruption and are working hard on finding a solution or at least a workaround to mitigate the impact.
The first mitigation will be an automated nightly restart of the protocol nodes which serve these Windows drives. This will occur at 0500hrs daily with an outage of 15 minutes each time. The first of these automated restarts will be scheduled for 0500 Thursday Aug 20th.
Further to that we are working on a POC that involves redesigning how the Samba service is delivered. This first needs building and testing to ensure it alleviates the problem, but we are addressing this with urgency. We will provide further updates on this approach when appropriate.