File Permission gotya in OSX

We have a Xojo Web app that write files to DropBox. (we implemented the APIs in Dropbox that work very well)

Lots of internal users need the documents that the web app creates.

In the beginning we simply had everyone who needed access to the documents created by the web app Sync their own Macs and PC to the Dropbox.

However this became silly as we how have 75,000 documents and every time one was added (hundreds per day) 30 PCS, all on the same shared office internet connection try to grab a copy of the document…choking of the bandwidth for other things and filling lots of hard drives. (killing a few MacBook Airs with their tiny drives etc)

So we added a single mac mini to suck down the Drop Box documents locally, set up SMB and AFP and we thought we were good.

We set the main folders read write permissions to: All Read & Write.

Our issue is that new folders are created and they are not getting the “open” permission for all.

What do we need to do to make sure all users can read and write to the dropbox?

Sounds like the ACL inherit setting is wrong. What tool are you using to set “All Read & Write”? In my experience, the Finder / Get Info does a terrible job of managing ACLs, it’s often best to use Terminal commands…

The best solution we found for this is to use an Apple Airport Basestation and hook up an external drive to it. It then uses no permissions and every machine can read & write without any issues.

File sharing via OS X is a inherently bad because of permissions and we got really fed up really quickly with the stupid ACLs.

I think you can remove permissions on external drives hooked up to a desktop as well (I did it with my old Mac mini and 10.6, not too certain if you can still do it or not)

Having the server software loaded and using that to set permissions generally works fairly well. Definitely better than the finder.

Also, check this post about setting the umask for dropbox. Its probably creating the folders with default perms that are not working well for your situation.

http://superuser.com/questions/549591/how-to-preserve-ownership-and-permissions-in-dropbox