[magusbuckley]

Hello:

I'm in IT at our company. Another IT associate and I are gritting our teeth because something on our fileserver that should be super simple isn't working the way we think it should.

We have added a Revenue Audit user, we'll call him Master Chief, to a folder under the Accounting folder. On the Accounting folder, we have granted Master Chief "Read and Execute", "List folder contents", and "Read". On the folder below that, the folder he needs into, we've granted him "Modify". This was set up some time ago and he's been using it for months.

Today, however, when he accesses the documents in that folder, they appear as "Read Only". We've checked his securities on the folder and the individual files. The folder isn't set to receive securities from the parent. We, in DOS, removed all "Read Only" attributes to that folder and it's subfolders. Then, we ran a query and it couldn't find any "Read Only" files or folders in that directory. Back at Master Chief's PC, we did another test and still could only open the documents as "Read Only". As a last and silly resort, we rebooted his machine after making those changes but we are still stuck.

What gives? Why does the system think he has "Read Only" access when we are clearly looking at his permissions seeing that he has "Modify"? Have any of you run across this issue before? If so, we could sure use some help here.

Any and all information will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Magus

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As far as I'm aware, the 'read only' attribute applies only to files only, not folders. Windows folders cannot be tagged 'read only'. Therefore, to remove the 'read only' attribute you have to remove it at file level, on a file by file basis. Removing 'read only' from folders will have no effect since there's no such thing.

[pip22]

As far as I'm aware, the 'read only' attribute applies only to files only, not folders. Windows folders cannot be tagged 'read only'. Therefore, to remove the 'read only' attribute you have to remove it at file level, on a file by file basis. Removing 'read only' from folders will have no effect since there's no such thing.

[magusbuckley]

pip22:

Actually, you can make a folder read only. In a way, you are correct, you can't make a folder read only. When you apply the read only attribute to a folder, however, it flows down to all sub-folders and files beneath it.

We finally figured out the problem.

First, let me explain something we thought was happening that wasn't. As it turns out, the folder wasn't set to Read Only. When we looked at the properties for that folder, Read Only was checked...but grayed out. Research showed that when a folder's read only attribute is in this state, it simply means that files and/or folders beneath it are set as "Read Only". If the folder itself was read only, the box would be checked...but not grayed out. The real catch, however, is that when the box is in this state, it doesn't necessarily mean that folders and/or files are set as read only. Sometimes, and I don't know why, the folder is in this state even if nothing below it is set as read only. We tested by creating new folders on our file server and noticed that their status was the same.

In the end, we found that Master Chief had only been granted "Read" from the SHARE of the root folder. We had to give him more authority on the share for him to be able to open and edit documents. Someone from IT must have made the change, but so far...no one has fessed up. Ha.

Thank you all for you help. I hope we've all learned a thing or two by this post.

Thanks,

Magus