[Malcolm]

Perhaps someone can help me understand what I'm missing. I've been using macs since OS6, but networking them is something I've only been doing rudimentary stuff with.
I have a main computer with a volume mounted from a sparsebundle, which I have been sharing with the other computers*. When I first started doing this, I just had the other computers connect as the main computer's admin credentials and then only mount the volume I want to share. Eventually, I decided to make a sharing-only account to share this volume so the other computers couldn't access the guts of the main computer. So, in Leopard (10.5.8)**, I added a sharing-only account and got all the other computers set up to connect to this computer and share the volume. However, when they put a file on this shared volume, it's permissions don't give me any access to the file, so I have to periodically apply the permissions from the top of the volume to all enclosed folders so I can access all added files.
In an effort to avoid having to deal with permission, I tried the "ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox (from Get Info on the top of the volume), but then the other computers couldn't access the files. So, I went back to having to adjust permissions periodically.
This past weekend, I decided to try upgrading to 10.6.8*** and everything seems worse. Now, none of the other computers can even see the volume to mount. I tried sharing a folder inside this volume and that isn't available to the other computers either.

So, here's the question: do I go back to 10.5 and the way I was doing things or is there a way to improve the managing of permissions with the setup I had? (Something like a way to allow the admin account to have full read and write permission for file created by the sharing account by default would be best, but I can't figure out how to do that.) Or, is there a way to make this all work right on 10.6?

I'm looking at a long night getting all of this ready for tomorrow.

Thanks for any help.



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* The reason for the mounted sparsebundle is that it's an encrypted sparsebundle and this makes it easier to back it up to a DVD and remain encrypted. If it were just a regular folder, then backup disks would be readable by anyone. Also, it needs to reside on the main computer so I have faster access to it, not feasible over the network, or I would have shared the volume from another computer in the beginning.
** I've kept it on Leopard because everything worked and I didn't want to take the risk of things not working and then spending the next week fixing them after upgrading.
*** Snow Leopard is the last OS to be able to run Rosetta and there are some files that can only be accessed from old programs, but not many... It also turns out that the things I had hoped would be better with 10.6 (better memory management, things being quicker) weren't.

[smax013]

Malcolm, on 06 August 2012 - 02:32 PM, said:

Perhaps someone can help me understand what I'm missing. I've been using macs since OS6, but networking them is something I've only been doing rudimentary stuff with.
I have a main computer with a volume mounted from a sparsebundle, which I have been sharing with the other computers*. When I first started doing this, I just had the other computers connect as the main computer's admin credentials and then only mount the volume I want to share. Eventually, I decided to make a sharing-only account to share this volume so the other computers couldn't access the guts of the main computer. So, in Leopard (10.5.8)**, I added a sharing-only account and got all the other computers set up to connect to this computer and share the volume. However, when they put a file on this shared volume, it's permissions don't give me any access to the file, so I have to periodically apply the permissions from the top of the volume to all enclosed folders so I can access all added files.
In an effort to avoid having to deal with permission, I tried the "ignore ownership on this volume" checkbox (from Get Info on the top of the volume), but then the other computers couldn't access the files. So, I went back to having to adjust permissions periodically.
This past weekend, I decided to try upgrading to 10.6.8*** and everything seems worse. Now, none of the other computers can even see the volume to mount. I tried sharing a folder inside this volume and that isn't available to the other computers either.

So, here's the question: do I go back to 10.5 and the way I was doing things or is there a way to improve the managing of permissions with the setup I had? (Something like a way to allow the admin account to have full read and write permission for file created by the sharing account by default would be best, but I can't figure out how to do that.) Or, is there a way to make this all work right on 10.6?

I'm looking at a long night getting all of this ready for tomorrow.

Thanks for any help.



-------------
* The reason for the mounted sparsebundle is that it's an encrypted sparsebundle and this makes it easier to back it up to a DVD and remain encrypted. If it were just a regular folder, then backup disks would be readable by anyone. Also, it needs to reside on the main computer so I have faster access to it, not feasible over the network, or I would have shared the volume from another computer in the beginning.
** I've kept it on Leopard because everything worked and I didn't want to take the risk of things not working and then spending the next week fixing them after upgrading.
*** Snow Leopard is the last OS to be able to run Rosetta and there are some files that can only be accessed from old programs, but not many... It also turns out that the things I had hoped would be better with 10.6 (better memory management, things being quicker) weren't.

I don't have an answer for how you are specifically doing it...at least not off the top of my head.

But, I might be able to offer another option...

You could just share a regular folder and then use a third party backup program to backup that folder...just be sure to choose a backup program that allows you to encrypt backups.

The other option would be to share a "regular folder" and still do a "manual" backup to an encrypted USB drive (either one with hardware encryption or some sort of software encryption such as TrueCrypt).