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Level 1

15 points

Admin permissions, custom access, irregular Everyone account

I updated from Tiger.
I did repair permissions from disk utility because of another problem (activity monitor crashes, repairing permissions took ages, but to no avail).

Problem:
I cannot delete any file anymore without entering my admin password.

I'm logged in as admin.
The folders have usual privileges, but the files inside all folders have corrupted privileges.

Get info is telling me (as admin) that I would have custom access.

Sharing & Permissions
You have custom access
Name: Privilege
everyone: custom
myadminname (Me): read & write
everyone: read only

You can see two everyone accounts, the first one having custom privileges.

What I've tried
Reboot
unplugging all cables
reboot
Tried repair permissions again, took ages again
Found another thread where the GroupID was switched to "20". This did not help in this case.

Went to the Home folder:
Get info:
Sharing & Permissions
You have custom access
Name Privilege
myadminname (Me): read & write
everyone: read only

As you can see, this folder still has custom access, and there is no additional everyone with custom access.
Tried: apply to enclosed items.
This took ages. Did not fix the problem. Still the same on all files: you have custom access.

I hope someone can tell me what flying-blind-console-unix-magick I have to enter to fix this. Oh, better tell me how to find the console. Or how to type. Since I've upgraded to Leopard, I feel like 25 years younger: a complete idiot sitting in front of an nonresponding computer.

The problem is, I really need my computer for production. Meaning that I am loosing money with every hour I am sitting in front of this nonresponding computer. Please help.

iMac G5, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Nov 2, 2007 3:48 PM

42 replies

Nov 4, 2007 9:00 AM in response to djhartman

*chmod -R -N ~*

That did it!!! Thank you so much, djhartman and all others who came up with suggestions!

Get Info now reports user Everyone has "no rights" => problems gone!

What generated those ACLs? Strange!

jdp79

Level 1

0 points

Nov 4, 2007 9:50 AM in response to djhartman

That corrected my issue as well.

Thank you so much.

acupoftea Author

Level 1

15 points

Nov 4, 2007 9:57 AM in response to djhartman

Thank you so much. This solved my remaining issues with my apache permissions, too.

- marked as solved.

ccdx

Level 1

0 points

Nov 4, 2007 6:41 PM in response to acupoftea

I'm having a little problem when I try to use the sudo chown -R yourshortusername:staff ~<enter>

it says: sudo: must be setuid root

what does this mean?

Nov 5, 2007 4:59 AM in response to ccdx

It means that the command sudo does not have the right permissions. This is bad. You should first try to repair permissions trough disk utility, that might fix sudo.

Nov 5, 2007 8:44 AM in response to acupoftea

I have been exactly through the same troubles and spent a lot of time reading what was proposed in these Discussions.
But instead of using Terminal commands that I don't understand (beware : not ALL what you find in the Discussions is true !), I preferred to re-install Leopard through an "Archive and Install" procedure, preserving user accounts and
their home folders, and existing network settings.
It worked flawlessly and all permissions are back to normal. I can now delete and create folders where I used to, etc...
I suggest you follow this method instead of playing with a devil box.

Nov 5, 2007 9:08 AM in response to Jean-Claude Jesior

... To complement my post: I originally upgraded to Leopard through a straight install over the existing Tiger X.4.10. This was my mistake ! An "Archive and Install" would have been safer.
Just to be sure that everything was OK after the "Archive and Install", I run Disk Utility to repair permissions: Everything was OK and I did not get anymore warning on "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent".
Hope this helps.

ccdx

Level 1

0 points

Nov 5, 2007 9:28 AM in response to acupoftea

Well through searching the internet I found a series of lines to input using the root account that managed to get back my sudo access. I then ran djhartman's list of inputs in the terminal and that made things a lot better.

The reason I didn't run my repair permissions in disk utility is because It has not been working since I installed 10.5. I'm not talking about the ARD issue everyone is having. When I run Repair permissions I get: Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit.

I really want to repair permissions because at this time I am not able to install anything using the Installer program. everytime I try to open a .pkg file it says that the Installer is damaged and that it's frameworks might not have proper permissions.

I was hoping to fix this with Disk utility, but obviously I can even run repair permissions.

I did manage to install Parallels (the .pkg I was trying to install) using a program called Pacifist, but whenever I try to open parallels it says it can't open because It can communicate with one of its drivers.

Nov 7, 2007 10:52 PM in response to acupoftea

The sudo chmod -R -N did the trick for me too. Thanks so much. But I do worry about users who aren't Terminal users. BTW - I installed Leopard with an Archive & Install, so clearly that isn't a global solution to avoiding these permissions issues.

Nov 10, 2007 2:46 PM in response to djhartman

djhartman wrote:

To get a list of your homedir and paste it here. Then we can see what kinds of special permissions are set.

Im also suffering these problems, amongst many other problems.

This is my home directory permissions

intern:~ victor$ ls -le
total 0
drwx------ 9 victor staff 306 Nov 10 22:41 Desktop
drwx------ 50 victor staff 1700 Nov 10 22:55 Documents
drwx------ 6 victor staff 204 Nov 10 22:56 Downloads
drwx------ 4 victor staff 136 Nov 10 22:44 Games
drwx------ 30 victor staff 1020 Nov 10 21:44 Library
drwx------ 3 victor staff 102 Nov 10 19:02 Movies
drwx------ 11 victor staff 374 Nov 10 21:33 Music
drwx------ 4 victor staff 136 Nov 10 22:34 Parallels
drwx------ 5 victor staff 170 Nov 10 22:00 Pictures
drwx------ 4 victor staff 136 Nov 10 19:02 Public
drwx------ 9 victor staff 306 Nov 10 22:34 Sites
drwx------ 3 victor staff 102 Oct 28 01:23 iFamilyForTigerData

All relatively normal, below is a problem directory.

intern:Address labels victor$ ls -le
total 0
drwx------@ 5 victor staff 170 Aug 19 16:21 Cathy and David.pages
drwx------@ 5 victor staff 170 Oct 11 14:00 Readers Digest.pages

Note the @ in the permissions .

intern:Address labels victor$ ls -l@
total 0
drwx------@ 5 victor staff 170 Aug 19 16:21 Cathy and David.pages
com.apple.FinderInfo 32
drwx------@ 5 victor staff 170 Oct 11 14:00 Readers Digest.pages
com.apple.FinderInfo 32

I can not find com.apple.FinderInfo on my system.

Nov 16, 2007 9:03 AM in response to Jim Muirhead

Agreed. I did an Archive and Install and had the same issues. That is not the solution. I think mine came from creating access for windows machines. Little confused about what I actually did to harm it.

Nov 27, 2007 10:39 PM in response to djhartman

Works great; problem solved; thanks again for the info...

Dec 1, 2007 11:00 AM in response to acupoftea

I have this very same problem. It just stated happening in last few days after a month of using leopard. Will try fix posted on tis thread see if it works.

Dec 1, 2007 11:16 AM in response to djhartman

sudo chmod -R -N ~ worked for me as well. Thanks!

Dec 1, 2007 11:23 AM in response to Dave Marcoot

I also did an archive and install and had this issues, but only recently. I upgraded to 10.5 a month ago.
Im not terminal user to unix person. but I was able to type in the sudo chmod -R -N ~ command and that seemed to work.

As a novice, is there anything about running that command I should be aware of? Would it break anything if i did in incorrectly?

Admin permissions, custom access, irregular Everyone account