tin-men

Saving MS Office files to Apple servers

I ran into a problem at work today; a user was unable to save any MS Office file to an AFP share that she clearly had access to. All other file types worked fine, but she was getting a permission denied error with Office files. After a bit of googling, it turns out that that Office saves it’s temporary files in /.TemporaryItems/folders. (local UID) /TemporaryItems where the local UID is the user’s unique ID on their local mac.

By default, the first user account created on a mac is 501, the second 502 and so on. The problem starts when you have multiple users with the same UID on their mac using the same volume – they’re unable to access their own TemporaryItems folder as someone else is the owner.

There are two solutions:

• To use network login (not practical in this case)
• To give the problem users a new globally unique UID

So here’s how to fix it on Leopard (the principle is the same in tiger, but you use NetInfo instead):

• First make sure you’ve got another Admin user on the system. If there isn’t one, make one. You can delete it after you’ve finished.
• When you’re logged in as the user whose UID you want to change, open Terminal.app and type in “id” (without the quotes) and take note of your current UID (e.g. mine says uid=504(graham), so my UID is 504)
• Still in terminal, type in the following (once again, without the quotes) “dscl . -change /Users/username UniqueID old# new#” so to change my UID from 504 (obtained above) to 2345 I’d enter “dscl . -change /Users/graham UniqueID 504 2345″
• Now log out of that account and log in as the other Admin user. Navigate to the user’s home folder that you’ve just changed the UID of. Right / Control click on it and choose Get Info. In the Sharing & Permissions pane click on the Plus icon and give the user Read / Write access to their home folder.

That should be it. I’ve done this several times now and it’s all worked out fine.

London calling

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Quite a bit has changed in the past four months.

I’ve been at RMStudio for over three months now. I’ve loved every second (well, nearly anyway!).

I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G (I love that too).

And as you may have noticed, I knocked up a new theme because I was bored with the old one. It’s full of javascript-y goodness and as an added bonus, it looks like shite in IE. And I don’t care. They shouldn’t be using the devil’s browser anyway.

So, the job. I’m an all round mac nerd. I do a bit of web stuff, I look after servers, I fix people’s email (“no, click on send, not delete…”). On the whole it’s pretty cool. I’m learning new nerdy stuff every day (ever wondered how Mail.app stores the email addresses you’ve sent mail to? I know more about it than anyone would ever want to, and I also have a series of scripts that will populate that database with email addresses for when people migrate from Entourage and haven’t been using their address book properly – I might do a post on it if anyone cares), and I work with a bunch of cool people. They might be the only people I know who get as excited by the prospect of being able to run OS X Server on a virtual machine as me!

I’ve learnt that I really, truly, deeply hate Adobe Air apps. Thankfully the ones we use here all have a mysql back end, so I can write my own interface to access the data (well, I will be when I stop working until 7-8pm most nights!).

Living in London is pretty cool too. It’s a little impersonal; it feels (and is) much, much bigger than Manchester. There’s loads going on, but I’ve been too busy with work to do anything of note. I am looking forward to meeting up with a few twitter people at the filming of Diggnation next week (must remember to call Nik at some point…).

Well, that was a random post. Sorry about that. I just had a few things buzzing around my head recently and I’ve been annoyed at myself with my lack of blogging.