All new Shares give Access Denied to Administrators

[ahavelind]

Please help,

     I have been running one eBox server with 17 XP Pro clients
for over 6 months now.  Other than this issue, it's been great SW.  I have created 10 share folders with ~30 users and 7 usergroups.  I am not using any 'group' shares - only manually created folders.  Several users and groups have Administrator privileges for the folders.  It worked
for several months.  Now they only have read access in 2 of the folders.  As well, they only have read access in any new folders I create.

I can't find anything similar on the forum's. This is now the 2nd time this has happened and I need
to either fix or move on as this renders my file sharing system unusable for the
company.  All Webgui permission settings are correct.  I even tried deleting the
share and recreating it (with the same name).  I then tried creating a new folder with a different name.  The permissions are the same.  I even tried creating a new group.  I tried looking through the samba.conf.mas file and it seems correct, although I am no expert.  Last time, I had to completely rebuild the system. Is there a way to check the permissions at the low level side?  Chmod via x does not seem to work (using the command line window on the desktop) - it gives me a permissions fault. 

Please help or direct me to information that can.  I'd really like to stay away from MS Server 2008.  Also, I'm not positive when this started, but it does seem to correlate to one of the eBox updates (automatic).   

Server Details:
Intel Dual Core PC running Ebox
File Sharing module - 1.4.2-0ubuntu1~ppa1~hardy1
Core version: 1.4.9
System load: 0.08, 0.03, 0.01
Only running system as a PDC and File Sharing server.
Second PC as router between Internet and server


Are there specific logs that I should pull?  I tried the Query Logs feature, but nothing comes up for the Samba Access logs for any time frame.



-Apollo


FYI - I got this response from the Zentyal Admins:

Dear Apollo

Thank you for your message and for using Zentyal - I'm sorry to hear of
the trouble you are facing with your installation.

After consulting with our Development Team, I can confirm that they are
not familiar with the issue you mention in your message. We would
greatly appreciate if you could report the error by opening a new ticket
[1] and attaching all the possible information regarding the error so
that we can take a look.

[Josep]

Samba sharing can be tricky. Most people forget that Linux is not Windows, even when it tries to fake it.
People that use Windows Server have a plethora of permissions and ACL combinations that are hard, if not impossible, to mimic in Linux. It is very common for people to get into trouble when they try to force a Linux system to replicate the exact behavior of a Windows one.
Having said that, it would be useful if you pinpointed the problem focusing on one particular folder/file where you experience these issues.
Is this problem occurring on all shares, on some of the old shares, or on any new share?
It would be helpful to post the permissions as they are reported in the shell with "ls -al" for each folder from the samba root to the one where you are having problems. Including smb.conf would also be important.
If you try to use chmod, it is very likely that you will need to do it with "sudo chmod" to have administration rights on any object.
It might be important to post the contents in "/etc/fstab" for that particular drive, to see which flags are in effect.
I can't think of anything else right now. I am not an expert by any means, but I have also been bitten by these sort of errors, and the solution was to simplify the structure and permissions.

[ahavelind]

Excellent - thanks for the reply -  I will try this tonight. 

As far as the occurances - it seems to be only on 2 older folders and on all newly created folders.  Maybe the default settings have changed?

Couple quick questions: 

Is there a way to run these commands via the Webgui so I can do it remotely (using Remote Desktop to one of the workstations)?  Or does it only work via the Desktop shell interface directly at the server?  I looked through the documentation and could not find anything.  I assume you can via SSH, but I haven't used it that much.  Need to read up on it.

Also - in regards to simplifying - do you have any recommendations?  Less groups, only groups?

Thanks again - will report back tonight.

-Apollo