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 agian, 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.