AFP file permission issues with Mac OS X

Question

I have two clients (one windows XP and one Mac OS X) connected to a UNIX server (centOS). The windows client connects through the Samba file protocol, and the Mac through AFP. For some reason the Mac OS X machine ignores the permissions set even when they are changed to 444; it just overrides the priveleges and is able to write to the file (along with changing the permissions to 777). I have been logging in as the administrator on both client machines.

Additionally, I have attempted to utilize the fperm property in the AppleVolumes.default configuration file to reflect the target permissions but to no avail.

Any suggestions on how to solve this issue? Please let me know if any further clarification is needed!

So you just decided to use SMB instead? Funny thing, if you don't properly configure the smb.conf you'll have the very same issue with it. It's not "the mac OSX machine" that does it, it's netatalk. But I couldn't guess how to configure it and since I don't have any environment to try, I just hope you could come up with a AFP solution for this and you come back to talk about it eventually. :P — cregox, May 03 '10 at 22:08

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 29 '09 at 20:07

If you have SMB working, why not just connect the Mac using that as well? Afaik, there's no advantage to use AFP in this case as OS X supports SMB equally well. AFP does have some minor benefits (such as SSO, Open Directory integration etc) when running in a Mac managed environment, but I don't think you need it here.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 29 '09 at 19:56

0

We use AFP almost exclusively in our Mac-centric network, and I haven't encountered a problem of the sort that you've mentioned. I'm afraid I've never tried to server files using AFP from a Linux box.

What happens if you put some files there that the AFP daemon (netatalk?) doesn't have read/write access to?

AFP is a sensible way to go; however, a work-around might be to connect the Mac to the CentOS server using AFP or NFS.

answered Oct 29 '09 at 19:56

Clinton Blackmore

3,510
6
35
61

I have been connecting the Mac to the CentOS server through AFP. The main problem is overwriting the file permissions on the client mac machine. Ever had an issue like that? – synchronicity Oct 29 '09 at 20:45
@synchronicity: No, not that I'm aware of. – Clinton Blackmore Oct 30 '09 at 14:07

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 30 '09 at 05:36

I second Kamil's response, (damn you for beating me to this question) you should just connect the Macs using SMB. The advantages you get by using AFP server on MacOSX Server, ie: Server Side File Tracking, Server Side Spotlight indexes, are not going to be supported by your CentOS box.

AFP file permission issues with Mac OS X

3 Answers3