Yesterday I encountered a strange (and debilitating) permissions problem on many of the folders on my ReadyNAS Pro 6.
I keep a large movie library on the device, and had been doing some file maintenance and organization on it via Media Center Master (an app used to organize and download movie artwork) and Media Browser (a front end GUI for Windows Media Center). I had been trying to clear some problematic cache files of JPG artwork files associated with many of the movie titles.
At one point I realized I could no longer edit the files for many of the movie folders, Media Center Master began reporting an error that "Access to the path was denied" for most of my titles, although some were completely unaffected and worked fine.
I began to look at the folder permissions (I'm on a Mac as a primary workstation, but the HTPC that plays back the movies is on a Windows 7 PC).
I saw that all the problematic movies had different permissions on the folder than the still-working titles.
On the "corrupt" titles, Get Info reports the following on the affected folders:
On unaffected folders, Get Info reports:
I have over 400 folders/movies, and short of going into Get Info for each one, I can't tell how many are corrupt, but out of the first 10, only 1-2 are still working properly, so the problem seems pervasive.
The worst part is that I cannot change the permissions back manually on either OS X or Windows, even though I have admin access on both machines. Both machines report the equivalent of my account not having permission to change the folder permissions, no matter what I try. Delving a little deeper into the Owner of the folders, I can see the owner is something like "Unix Owner: ReadyNAS/[My User name]".
I have no idea how or when this problem occurred. Aside from the organization/maintenance I was performing, the only unusual thing that happened yesterday was a power outage. Not sure if/how this could have randomly affected the permissions on my folders, but it's the only out of the ordinary event I can think of.
On the ReadyNAS Pro 6, I have AFP, CIFS, and NFS running as services, and cannot fix the permissions no matter which file service I use to the mount the volume/share. In FrontView, I have no unusual settings, no user accounts, and the admin account of course is set to have Read/Write permission on all folders.
I can't seem to find the equivalent of a "Repair Permissions" function (like you would on an OS X hard drive), and I've tried rebooting the ReadyNAS, stopping/starting each of the file system services, and restarting both my Mac and PC numerous times.
Re: Strange folder permissions error, out of the blue
Go to Shares > Share Listing > Sharename > AFP. As well as CIFS, AFP, NFS etc. you should see an "Advanced Options" tab. You can use this to fix the permissions of the share.
