Problem with permissions on Airport Extreme attached drive

[DavidRavenMoon]

Hello everyone. I'm hoping someone can figure this one out. I tried over at the Apple support forums, and only heard crickets.

I recently picked up an Airport Extreme to replace a cheap TrendNet wireless router. One of the main reasons I got the AE was so I can connect an external hard drive which has all my iTunes music on it. I used to connect that directly to my iMac, and then the other Macs in the house would share it. But my Mac had to be on, and the connection was often flaky.

In my house, we have three Macs, my iMac, my wife's G4 MDD, and my son's MacBook Pro. We all share the iTunes files, so we have our iTunes pointing to the external drive. So far, so good, and it works as it should.

Now the issue... everyone in my family also has their own account on my iMac. Now the problem; if I'm logged in, and my wife decides to log into her user account on the iMac, I lose access to the hard drive. I can see it, but it has a restricted mark through it. If I remount the drive/server, now she has no access to it.

When we share it via the AE from different Macs, everything is fine. I have Airport Utility set to allow access with the wireless network password. Both my iMac and my wife's G4 are connected via ethernet. My son has a wifi connection.

From the Finder I cannot change the permissions on the mounted drive. It says it's owned by "(unknown)" who has Read & Write privileges. The next user/group is "everyone" who has No Access. I can't change those or add users that way.

Anyone have a clue? I'm usually good with networking and this kind of stuff, but this has me stumped! I have to also say, I was surprised how convoluted the Airport was to set up and administer. Following Apple's instructions didn't work (at least not if I wanted to access the Internet!), and the whole thing is way too arcane. Not exactly Mac like. By comparison the TrendNet was a pain, but seemed easier to set up, which I find shocking!

 

[The Deuce]

Did you ever have any luck and figure this out? I am having the exact same problem and can't find anything. Was working fine in Snow Leopard and seemed to be working fine once I upgraded to Lion. But I just did a clean install of Lion and now I'm having this issue. Very annoying.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

No, I never found a way to fix it. I had an issue where the disk needed some minor repairs, so I plugged it directly into my Mac to run DiskWarrior on it. While I was at it, I was able to change the permissions.

But once it's mounted as a server via AirPort, it shows up as;
(unknown): Read & Write
everyone: No Access

Individual folders on the volume are fine though, it's just the volume itself that can't be changed.

So the problem persists when two users are both on this Mac.

Another really annoying thing is how the drive constantly spins down. It makes everything come to a stand still when you try to access something and have to wait for the drive to spin back up.

 

[The Deuce]

I am seeing that exact same permission issue that you see. And I will see an "duplicate" folder on the desktop in addition the mounted network drives with the same name but the duplicate icon has the red circle with a line in the corner of the icon signifying no permission to it. I will still have access to the drive but iTunes is not able to connect. When it works properly the duplicate icons do not show up and the sharing connection works great even with iTunes.

Now, I have been messing round some more this morning with it. I have disabled "fast user switching". The problem seemed to be that the other account, who ever had access to the drives first (me since my account is the main and i have it set to auto login to my account at startup) locked onto them and the user that I fast switched to was out of luck. Now it seems to work.

I also have a script that auto mounts the network drives at start up, which seems to be required when I use iTunes and Time Machine.

tell application "Finder"
activate
try
mount volume "afp://UserAccount:password@192.168.1.1/Network Drive Name"

end try
end tell

Italics should be updated to your specific needs and the IP address is the AE base station address. Password should be the Airport Extreme password, which may or may not be the same as your OS X user account password. You can add multiple lines of "mount...." right after one another if you have more than one drive attached.

In the past I could be on my account and time machine (on the network drive with the issue) would start up. I could switch to my wife's user account and it would not affect time machine or the connection to the network drive at all. WHen she logged in Time Machine would still be spinning and backing up. Now I have not tested that yet to see if fully logging off to have proper shared access to the drive would cause time machine to stop in between the log off/log on or pause or something worse... I will mess some more and post again later.

Let me know if you try to disable fast user switching and if it works for you.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

Well disabling Fast User Switching would prevent two people from being logged in, and that's where the issue is. If I log out, and let my wife log in, everything is fine.

It also works fine when she's connected to the volume from her G4 in the other room, and my son has no issue from his MacBook Pro.

It's only a problem when two people are logged in at the same time on my iMac.

To mount the volume, I put it in Startup Items.

 

[The Deuce]

Yeah, I agree, its still a frustrating issue. So do you normally have files open, websites, etc while you are logged in and then your wife can fast switch and open other stuff at the same time. That is how we have been doing it until this problem showed up.

So now I turned the fast user switch off and I noticed that Lion always loads up apps and windows that you had opened before log-off. I opened a few websites and text edit and typed some stuff and then logged off without saving. I logged into my wife's account and did the same...then logged off...then logged back on to my account and all of it auto opened when I got logged in, even the unsaved text edit file. So now it "feels" just like fast user experience. But, I'm not sure how that would work with other more sophisticated programs but I will be testing it. I doubt I could be working on a file on the network drive then log off and let my wife take over, then log back on with that file still open, but maybe, I'll check it and see.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

The hard drive mounted via Airport has our iTunes files on it. That way we all share the same files, and don't have redundant stuff in our home folders.

So the scenario would be that my wife wants to log in on my Mac to either play some music while cooking (My iMac is in the living room) or check email or something. She has her own Mac in our bedroom that's on the network.

So when she logs in on my Mac, while I'm logged in, she can't access the volume unless I log out.

If you don't have fast user switching on, and don't want to have apps and windows open in Lion, uncheck that box when shutting down. You can also turn off automatic login, so you will go to the login window. Thats how my Mac starts up.

But the main reason for that is the checkbox that asks if you want to open previous windows and apps. There is no global way to disable that, and I hope they change that behavior soon. I understand why they do it, but it can be a nuisance.

 

[The Deuce]

I tried some more things with editing text files and logging off. Now in my ?Volumes folder I have more of the duplicates i mentioned earlier. I had the real Volume, then I also have HD Name-1, HD Name-2, HD Name-3, and HD Name-4, that seems to be creating a new duplicate but empty folder each time I access it.

The good news is that it kept all the unsaved text when i logged off, maybe it auto saves, but it did not open that file back up at login. i had to open it manually and saw that no data was lost.

This is now starting to worry me.

 

[DavidRavenMoon]

I had two instances of the drive a couple of times. This happened when my wife logged in, and when the volume mounted, it had the no access slash icon. Then I mounted the drive via Connect to Server with the password, and it mounted it again with read/write access.