New Mac / Ventura won't let me log in to Snow Leopard Server

Thank you for your continued support Barney-15E.

File sharing was turned off on my wife's MacBook Air, as it's the server that's doing the file sharing. I tried turning file sharing on, and then off again, on my wife's MacBook Air – among many other things, also on the server side.

Therefore, I am unsure what helped, as far as being able to log in to the server using my wife's log-in credentials, but at the end I was able to log in as my wife, from her computer. Unfortunately, that still didn't give her write permissions to the needed Sharepoint, so it seems there is something wrong on the server side.

My workaround for now, to give my wife write permissions to files and folders on the server, is to have my wife use my son's log-in credentials instead.

The server configuration seems broken somehow, and I don't feel confident enough as a server administrator, so I am considering reinstalling the server and setting it up from scratch. As I just use it for file sharing for three users on our local network and for automatic Time Machine backups, I think it could be set up pretty simply, just using Server Preferences and avoiding the more advanced server tools available in the Workgroup Manager and Server Admin modules. That way, I feel I am more likely to succeed, than if I try to "fix" the current setup. As it is right now, I can't seem to do anything within Server Preferences - it's all greyed out and sometimes gives error messages I don't understand what to do about.

Maybe I should just use a newer, non-server version of MacOSX, instead of the old Snow Leopard Server software I am currently using? The hardware is a 2010 Mac Mini with dual hard drives currently set up in a mirroring RAID configuration. However, I am unsure which versions of MacOSX would be compatible with that hardware.

Hi Barney-15E,

I decided to update the OS from Snow Leopard Server to OS X El Capitan 10.11.6. My intention was to do a clean install, so I made a bootable installer USB-stick. However I ended up NOT doing a clean install, as the Disk Utility on the stick didn't allow me to erase the mirrored RAID-configured harddisk(s). An upside of that was that I didn't have to migrate all my data from the TimeMachine backup after the installation. The downside was that I'd not gotten rid of the permissions mess. 

Anyway, with help from this I did my best to try to set up file sharing. To avoid naming confusion between old and new, I created three new uniquely named ‘sharing only' user accounts on the Mac Mini, which is still named 'Server'. I also created a group consisting of these three users (named ‘R        Group’ in screenshot further down). 

Here’s a screenshot of the top level of the Mac Mini drive (named ‘Server RAID’):

The folder I want to share is the ‘r’ folder, which is inside the top level ’Groups’ folder (that’s the way it was when the machine was set up as a Snow Leopard Server). The ‘r’ folder is the top of a hierarchy of subfolders and files, that should all have the same permissions. Here’s a screenshot from the 'Sharing' pane:

In that screenshot the shared folder ‘Groups’ is highlighted, but the Users and permissions are the same for the ‘r’ folder. What I did was to right-click on the ‘Groups’ folder and select ‘Apply Permissions to Enclosed Items’.

Under File Sharing Options I've checked both AFP and SMB:

While my wife’s MacBook Air with Monterey allows me to connect under both protocols, I have had trouble connecting under the smb protocol from my MacBook Air with Sonoma 14.1.2, so that has added to the confusion. After a long day of trial and error, I thought I had it working the way I wanted it to: We could both read and write to the ‘r’ folder and its subfolders. Then I noticed that if I edited a shared Excel-file, the permissions of the file would change, so that my wife would not be able to edit the same file at later point in time. This is the kind of stuff we need to be able to do, so it’s still not working as I need it to. 

You’d already seen this coming and wrote: “Using Terminal, you can set the Access Control Lists on the folders to allow all users to edit other user's documents.” Terminal commands are not my strong suit – can you please help me?

S U C C E S S – Y A Y !

Thank you man! – for the time and effort you put into helping. I couldn't have done it without you.

Barney-15E wrote:

Unless you made the changes to r, it won’t have any ACLs or flags set.

I chose to include the first two commands "to play it safe" - weird things had happened to the permissions, when I had messed around with setup and settings on the Snow Leopard Server. Basically, an expression of my distrust in my own abilities as a server administrator.

Barney-15E wrote:

With the path just “r”, you would need to cd into Group directory. If you use the absolute (full) path to the folder, you don’t need to change the working directory.

I always found full paths hard - and requiring odd characters I am unsure how to type on my Danish keyboard (like tilde and backslash – and also how to handle spaces in file and folder names). So I did it by navigating to the 'Groups' folder ahead of entering the three commands.

I had a minor mishap, already in the first command: It couldn't interpret “r”. Found out that was due to the wrong kind of quotation marks (“r” when it should have been "r"). In the 35 years that has passed, I'd forgotten about that. Lesson learned for the second and third commands.

Barney-15E wrote:

Sorry, I didn't catch that when you posted. Looking back now, I can see them.

Don’t be sorry - be glad !

You helped tremendously and led me to success.

Nothing happened, except I relearned one of the basics of UNIX-commands. Not a bad thing.

I’d edited the commands in Notes and Notes had “auto-corrected” to “smart” quotation marks. Notes (like other text editors) is not smart enough, though, to know when lines of text are UNIX commands, and so, when to leave the quotation marks unaltered.

Wow, thank you Barney-15E! That's all it took - problem solved!

I don't really understand the difference between what I did and what you suggested is. I think that once I get to the login-window and write a correct username and password - it is counter-intuitive that it just shakes and rejects it. Here's what I did, that didn't work:

And here is what you suggested, that did work:

As I wrote back then: my issue was solved. However, only for my MacBook Air. I can't use the same trick on my wife's older M1 MacBook Air running MacOS 12.1 Monterey. She can see files on the server (read permission), but cannot write to any share points on the server. When I try, I never get a chance to type in login credentials, no matter which way I go about connecting to the server. Any suggestions?

Thanks Barney-15E

The problem is that it doesn't time out or anything - it just connects as guest straight away – without a login window ever showing up. So I assume she's logged in as a guest, because the contents of the server become visible right away – and readable, but only readable.

Thanks once again Barney-15E, I really appreciate your help!

It was about 35 years ago I was using/learning UNIX commands and I haven’t really used it since, except for the occasional copy and paste into Terminal. So before I carry it out, I thought I’d describe what I think I should do: 

Navigate to the ‘r’ folder (or should that be the 'Groups' folder?) with cd .. and cd commands, checking my position as I go with the ls command, then:

Sudo chflags -R nouchg “r”
Sudo chmod -RN “r”
Sudo chmod -R +ai "group:Rgroup allow list,add_file,search,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,file_inherit,directory_inherit" “r”/*

In reality the 'R Group' name is longer - anonymized with spaces - and 'Rgroup' in the last command above is just an abbreviated placeholder name. In the actual command I would use the real, unabbreviated group name.

Does the above look correct to you?