Various File Save error messages with Word 2004 and Tiger (10.4.2) Server

[Beth Rosengard]

Hi Keith,

I'm passing on your offer to the appropriate people.

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Beth Rosengard
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[Rob Daly [MSFT]]

I'm going to post this same information for every separate report of this
same issue that there is on the newsgroups. Hopefully, it will help at least
some of you:

The Problem:
Word is having various problems saving to remote home folder (henceforth RH,
RHF) shares from 10.4.x clients.

The larger problem:
Not everybody is having this issue and, of those who are, the problem
doesn't exhibit the same symptoms.

This one has been around for a while now and here at Microsoft we are still
working on pinning down the exact cause. Word File I/O code is incredibly
complex and that, combined with the configuration differences of remote home
folders, combined with the unknown change to RHF client code in 10.4.x makes
this a very tricky problem to provide a general fix for. I have been
personally working with many of the affected customers to try to identify
the cause and workarounds for this problem and while the cause remains
elusive, one of the following workarounds may be the one for you...

So far I can share these known workarounds. DISCLAIMER: NONE OF THESE MAY
WORK.

Workaround 1:
Check to ensure you haven't got two instances of the remote home folder
server mounted. Often, admins will have a logon script to mount the server
on the desktop to provide users easy access to directories other than their
home folder. This is bad as it causes Word to trip over a file lock problem
as it is working with duplicate paths to the same file. The workaround: Do
not remount the server, just create an alias to the root directory.

Workaround 2:
Change the user preference in Word to specify the exact path to the
documents folder. Go to Word: Preferences: File Locations. In the location
for document saving, navigate the path to the RH Documents folder. This has
fixed the issue for many customers, but again not for all.

Workaround 3:
Upgrade to 10.4.3. A small proportion of afflicted customers have been
reporting the issue's disappearance with 10.4.3. The worst that can happen
is that it doesn't work .

Workaround 4:
Turn off spotlight for OS partition. Read/Write operations may be getting
strangled by Spotlight especically when they are I/Oing over the wire to
disk space located on the RHF. This may help.

We are working on a better solution to this problem as a matter of highest
priority. As soon as I have any more information I will post it to this
newsgroup. MVPs or others, please feel free to cross-post this to wherever
it's needed or wherever I have missed.


NOTE FOR THIS THREAD: I am talking directly about problems with RHF saving
here. Virex and NAV problems are unrelated. My advice in those cases is just
don't use them or don't have them scan any disk location that you use
regularly with office (think documents, preferences, applications folders
here, possibly more)

--
Rob Daly
Macintosh Business Unit
Word Test

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[spacefishunleashed]

I have a similar issue but my set up and error messages are different.
am running the following.
OSX 10.3.9 Server
5 OSX 10.39 Clients
4 OSX 10.4.3 Clients
Problems are with the files that the 10.4.3 clients are saving to th
server. The group permission setting is being set to read only, shoul
be full access. Also, 10.4.3 clients get an error message somethin
like "a permissions or server error has occurred

 

[claremont]

Looking for somewhere to post, I found this thread. Hopefully, this is
on topic:

Saving Word Documents (New or Existing)

The new version of Word has a problem when saving documents to network
folders. Users with network home directories have a problem with Save
or Autosave from Word 2004 11.2 (Office Service Pack 2) on OSX 10.4.2,
and see an error message saying "Word cannot save this document due to
a naming or permissions error on the destination volume." The first
attempt to save succeeds; subsequent attempts to save, or autosave,
will fail with the above error message.

The fault occurs unless a folder called .TemporaryItems has been
created at the root level of any mounted volume containing the saved
file; so if the users home directory is contained in an AFP share
called "Homes", there has to be a directory called .TemporaryItems in
the Homes folder on the server. If the home directory is on another
local volume called UserData, there has to be a directory called
..TemporaryItems at the root of that volume.

Since .TemporaryItems is a dot file, it will not be visible in the
Finder. When the application is able to create this .TemporaryItems
directory, it is world writable and sticky. For improved security, as
long as all users are in a common group like "staff", then the folder
can be restricted to writing by the group instead.

cd /path/to/volume/or/sharepoint
sudo mkdir .TemporaryItems
chgrp staff .TemporaryItems
chmod 1770 .TemporaryItems

This seems to fix the problem.

James

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

James:

Many thanks for your post. The man who posted the item you followed-up to,
Rob Daly, is actually working on the code involved in Word, so I will now
sit back and see what he makes of your response

We will all be deeply indebted to you if you have found the solution: Rob
has been chasing it now for months

Cheers

Looking for somewhere to post, I found this thread. Hopefully, this is
on topic:

Saving Word Documents (New or Existing)

The new version of Word has a problem when saving documents to network
folders. Users with network home directories have a problem with Save
or Autosave from Word 2004 11.2 (Office Service Pack 2) on OSX 10.4.2,
and see an error message saying "Word cannot save this document due to
a naming or permissions error on the destination volume." The first
attempt to save succeeds; subsequent attempts to save, or autosave,
will fail with the above error message.

The fault occurs unless a folder called .TemporaryItems has been
created at the root level of any mounted volume containing the saved
file; so if the users home directory is contained in an AFP share
called "Homes", there has to be a directory called .TemporaryItems in
the Homes folder on the server. If the home directory is on another
local volume called UserData, there has to be a directory called
.TemporaryItems at the root of that volume.


Since .TemporaryItems is a dot file, it will not be visible in the
Finder. When the application is able to create this .TemporaryItems
directory, it is world writable and sticky. For improved security, as
long as all users are in a common group like "staff", then the folder
can be restricted to writing by the group instead.

cd /path/to/volume/or/sharepoint
sudo mkdir .TemporaryItems
chgrp staff .TemporaryItems
chmod 1770 .TemporaryItems

This seems to fix the problem.

James

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John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[jlindley9]

Has anyone come up with a workaround for the Powerpoint problem beside
saving as Outline (RTF) format? The problem is that no matter where yo
try to save, network or local, the user gets an error "accessing th
disk." This only happens when the user is logged in through th
network. When I log in with a local user account, I can save locally
But, this doesn't help our users. At least with Word and Excel, we ca
have our users save to a local directory. Any help would be greatl
appreciated.

John

I tried disabling Spotlight, but it didn't make a difference

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

John:

Yeah, there's a solution for that one, if it's what I think it is...

I think the user's system has two paths to the same volume. Chances are the
user's login script is mounting the same folder twice, once as the user's
home folder and once as the user's file storage area.

Due to an Apple bug, when Word asks for the Path it gets a "File in use"
error returned (because it IS in use, via the other path...)

Beth and Rob have the whole misery explained here:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/Can'tSaveToServer.htm

Cheers

Has anyone come up with a workaround for the Powerpoint problem besides
saving as Outline (RTF) format? The problem is that no matter where you
try to save, network or local, the user gets an error "accessing the
disk." This only happens when the user is logged in through the
network. When I log in with a local user account, I can save locally.
But, this doesn't help our users. At least with Word and Excel, we can
have our users save to a local directory. Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

John

I tried disabling Spotlight, but it didn't make a difference.

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Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[jlindley9]

John, thank you for your help. I had tried some of the othe
suggestions here, but they didn't work. Finally I tried the 10.4.
upgrade and it solved all of our problems. I had been reluctant to tr
it since most people said it didn't help, plus the fact that I had hear
reports of new bugs introduced in this update. But, so far, so good fo
us.

Again, just to recap, running the latest updates to Office and Tige
solved our problems.

Good luck everyone.

Joh

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

That's great 10.4.3 will fix it for some customers. The issue is still
around for others. It's a really difficult one to find...

Thanks for getting back to us.

John, thank you for your help. I had tried some of the other
suggestions here, but they didn't work. Finally I tried the 10.4.3
upgrade and it solved all of our problems. I had been reluctant to try
it since most people said it didn't help, plus the fact that I had heard
reports of new bugs introduced in this update. But, so far, so good for
us.

Again, just to recap, running the latest updates to Office and Tiger
solved our problems.

Good luck everyone.

John

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Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Martin Bergström]

Did the ".TemporaryItems" thing, and it seemed to work for a while (a few
hours), but then the problem came back. I'd also like to add the removing
"com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist" located in
*home*->Library->Preferences->Microsoft helps, but also just temporarily.

Any more suggestions?

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

No. The suggestions we have in Beth's article are all we have up to know.
A lot of the text in that article was written by the Microsoft developers
working on the problem.

Regrettably, we have yet to hear from Apple on the subject. They have some
work to do also. If anyone is talking to them, please post their responses
in here!

Did the ".TemporaryItems" thing, and it seemed to work for a while (a few
hours), but then the problem came back. I'd also like to add the removing
"com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist" located in
*home*->Library->Preferences->Microsoft helps, but also just temporarily.

Any more suggestions?

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[brian]

There seem to be many, many reports of similar problems. It seems to be
to be outrageous that after serveral years this is still happening. It
doesn't seem to be just Tiger and Word 2004 at all. After having no
previous problems we now have save problems having installed a Buffalo
Terastation (a Windows box I think). Previously no problems with a
SnapServer (Linux based). We can't now save Word files from Word 2004
Mac (OSX 10.3.9) to the TeraStation but can to the SnapServer. Word X
on System 10.3.9 on one machine - no problem. Word has dropped a
Temporary Items folder onto the Tera (not prefixed dot).

Are there really no working solutions yet?

 

[brian]

Thanks John I will check through it. Since I posted I found this
further bit of information - with the Terastation we were connecting
via Go to Server to avoid naming issues. When I tried connecting via
SMB the Word saving issue disappeared but some naming issues
reappeared! I'll look at the article.

 

[brian]

I have run through the document and its 4 fixes. Our problem seems
similar to the historic one and is happening on our OS 10.3.9 machines.

1. My problem although I suspect related is not about HF or RHF as far
as I can see. The server we are using is NOT OSX - we are just using a
network attached RAID server. This means I don't think the issue abou
RHF affects us - I don't see how we can avoid having the server appear
on the desktop - that's the way the OS displays servers.

2. Tried the file locations work round - didn't work

3. Haven't tried upgrading to Tiger - been reluctant since upgrades
usually break as much as they solve but may have to consider it.

4. Spotlight isn't on Panther

This leaves me with only the upgrade to Tiger 10.4.3 option I guess.

 

[David Ross]

Here's some more information.

File server is an XServe G4/1.33 with OS X Server unlimited and the OS
version is 10.3.9.

Client machines all have 10.4.3 and Office 2004. All Apple and OS
patches current as of about a week ago.

Home folders are ALL local in the boot partition.

There is a partition on each machine called xxx_Scratch where xxx is the
name of the computer and Word is told to put auto recover files in this
partition.

Fast Saves off.

Always make a backup copy off.

There are 3 share points on the server that users may mount. Call them
A, B, and C. 99.99% of the time they will be working in A. (B is for
reference information and C is a slush area for pictures.) We've only
seen the problem with A but I doubt that anyone has worked on a Word
document in B or C. All of these share points are a Folder on a Server
partition.

All users log into the server with the same username and password
combination. On the client systems the default permissions for new files
is set to owner, group, everyone, can do anything.

I just did a check at the root level of share point A and an ls -a -l gave:
drwxrwxrwt 3 vita admin 102 16 Dec 11:48 .TemporaryItems

I did the:
chmod 1770 .TemporaryItems

and now an ls -a -l gives:
drwxrwx--T 3 vita admin 102 16 Dec 11:48 .TemporaryItems

Which to me seems less likely to work but we'll see.

Are there any new developments since mid-December? Is there any other
information I can provide?