Sharing Violations
I just started a new job, and it's a small enough company I'm expected to be part IT man.
My boss put a bug in my ear about a problem, which is when you go to save a file and get told you don't have authorization to do it (even though you do), or go to delete a file and get told it can't be done. I'm talking beyond 'read only,' that you just can't modify the file because your computer thinks someone else has it open on the network, or thinks you don't have permissions to do it.
I had this happen all the time in my last job, and it was easy to blame our incompetent IT manager. But that was on a mainly PC network, and this is an all Mac network, and the same shit happens.
What causes this? What books are good for boning up on the networking/IT side with Macs?
When we call soccer 'football' the terrorists have won.
hey, congrats on the new job - way to go - sorry if i couldn't be more help before, but sounds like you landed on your feet - pm me if i can do anything else
peace,
richard
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My gut feeling is this is not the problem in this case, but one thing that causes this sort of problem in general is if clocks are out of sync because it fucks with encryption such as Kerberos, SSL, IPSec. On Windows domains, computers are supposed to sync to the AD / PDC when they "log on" to the network, which is all well and good if the server clock is correct. Windows XP Professional will also typically sync to some internet address once a week via Network Time Protocol (NTP). My general practice is to set up some kind of NTP client that manages clocks a bit more rigorously than that, [URL=http://www.ntp-systems.com/symmtime.asp]SymmTime[/URL] is a free one that is very good, also people who deal with multiple times zones find it handy e.g. you can display East Coast and West Coast time so you know what time it is if you need to call somewhere. My guess is Mac OS > 10.2 has NTP built in, but fuck if I know how to configure it.
Another problem on Windows networks is something called [URL=http://www.superbase.com/services_tech_support_oplocks.htm]OPLOCKS[/URL] which frequently causes problems with database and database-like file formats, such as spreadsheets, access, ACT!, Quickbooks etc. It's supposed to provide performance enhancement by caching writes on the local machine and keeping writes in sync between multiple machines without requiring that all do synchronous I/O to the server. With things like databases, ideally you want to be able to do things like lock individual records rather than the whole fricking file, in which case sharing via a network filesystem is really ill-suited to that task, but such as it is. There has got to be something analogous for Macs, but I don't know the details.
If you've got older Macs on the network like OS 9 or even 7-8 they might be using something like *shudder* AppleTalk. If anything is still using Gator / PhoneNet or SCSI-to-Ethernet I highly recommend that you take it up to the roof of the building and hurl it off onto the abyss post haste and tell the user to stop being so fucking stingy and get a real fucking computer because this is not the 90's. You might learn something interesting by setting up a Linux PC with netatalk and running nbplkup to find out what the Macs think about themselves, you might find things like share names with fucked up characters in them (or fucked up characters using them for that matter).
This is a really good idea.