Word 2004 and OS X Server 10.4.8 Wackiness - Revisited

[Mark Gibson]

Hi,

I tried to post a reply to the original thread burt its been
archived.

John referred my to a URL about changing UID entries.

Well I visited that and changed the 30 odd machines at the clients and
things seemed OK for a few weeks.

Last week though the office went off the rails as first one machine
and then more and more reported all manner of weird errors ("not able
to save, too many files open", "File type not recognised", opening
files as read only when the author had read, write, create, etc.).

Eventually the only fix appeared to be to get everyone off and restart
the Xserve and then get people to graduallly log back in again.

Any ideas as to what is going on and more importantly will the
combination of Office 200X (the universal binary) coming since
MacWorld 2006 and 10.5 fix it?

Regards,

Mark

Original thread included below:

Hi,
Whilst I suspect the default response is "Its Microsoft what else do
you expect" I'm hoping someone has a workaround for this.

Over the weekend we upgraded the office of a client from Office X
running under OS X Server 10.4.8 (with 10.4.8 on all clients) to
Office
2004 and then patched up to the recent Office 11.3 release.

The network is Cat 6 with Gigabit switches.

Under Office X everything ran fine, now the users are getting
intermittent errors:

"There has been a network or file permission error. The network
connection may be lost."

The server icon remains on the desktop and files can be accessed.

The current work around is to save the file to the desktop, quit Word
and copy the file back to the correct position on the server.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

or should i think of backing out to Word X until the new version of
Office or Leopard arrives?


Reply to author Forward

2. John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]
View profile
More options Dec 20 2006, 11:05 pm
Hi Mark:
This is often a UID clash. See here:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CantSaveToServer.html

Cheers

On 20/12/06 3:41 PM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "Mark Gibson"

- Show quoted text -

--
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. Business Analyst,
Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[Mark Gibson]

Hi Mark:

You need an Apple networking specialist for this. Sadly, you are the only
one who has reported this problem for months, so we have little to go on.

I very much doubt whether it is OS 10.4.8 on either the server or the client
that is causing this. I suspect it is some irritating misconfiguration or
conflict (if it was the 10.4.8 update, we would be deluged with complaints,
and so far we're not, as you can see...)

I haven't a clue: But it might be worth looking to see whether you have
both AFP and SMB protocols running between the server and the same client.

I would ask myself how the clients are deriving their UIDs. (Has the domain
controller suddenly handed out new UIDs to the users?)

I would ask whether the users are actually logging in to the server with
their unique user IDs.

Sorry: Yell again if it was none of the above and I will see if I can find
a networking specialist for you.

Nobody can tell you how the new version of Office is going to behave. Or
rather: those who do know are not allowed to tell us; those who tell us,
don't know.

However, generically Office simply calls the operating system for all of its
file handling and network transport (on both Mac and PC). It doesn't have
any of its own networking components. That methodology is likely to be
unchanged in the new version. So I would expect the new version to do
exactly as the old version does: use whatever Apple provides.

Hope this helps

Hi,

I tried to post a reply to the original thread burt its been
archived.

John referred my to a URL about changing UID entries.

Well I visited that and changed the 30 odd machines at the clients and
things seemed OK for a few weeks.

Last week though the office went off the rails as first one machine
and then more and more reported all manner of weird errors ("not able
to save, too many files open", "File type not recognised", opening
files as read only when the author had read, write, create, etc.).

Eventually the only fix appeared to be to get everyone off and restart
the Xserve and then get people to graduallly log back in again.

Any ideas as to what is going on and more importantly will the
combination of Office 200X (the universal binary) coming since
MacWorld 2006 and 10.5 fix it?


Original thread included below:

Hi,
Whilst I suspect the default response is "Its Microsoft what else do
you expect" I'm hoping someone has a workaround for this.

Over the weekend we upgraded the office of a client from Office X
running under OS X Server 10.4.8 (with 10.4.8 on all clients) to
Office
2004 and then patched up to the recent Office 11.3 release.

The network is Cat 6 with Gigabit switches.

Under Office X everything ran fine, now the users are getting
intermittent errors:

"There has been a network or file permission error. The network
connection may be lost."

The server icon remains on the desktop and files can be accessed.

The current work around is to save the file to the desktop, quit Word
and copy the file back to the correct position on the server.

Any thoughts on what might be causing this?

or should i think of backing out to Word X until the new version of
Office or Leopard arrives?

Reply to author Forward

2. John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]
View profile
More options Dec 20 2006, 11:05 pm
Hi Mark:
This is often a UID clash. See here:
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CantSaveToServer.html

Cheers

On 20/12/06 3:41 PM, in article
(e-mail address removed), "Mark Gibson"

- Show quoted text -

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

--

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. Business Analyst, Consultant
Technical Writer.
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

John,

They don't run SMB (or any Windows services on the server) since the
office has no need for Windows boxes.

Yes they log on as the indicated user (there is no "guest" logon and
the admin account is password protected).

The UID's generated by the Xserve match the UIDs used by the clients
(i.e. they haven't changed since I changed them from the default
"501").

There is no "domain" (no Windows servers or clients so I don't need
any of that) in the classic Windows sense.

Well I guess if it happens again I'll just have to schedule a restart
for the server every 6 weeks or so and wait for Leopard.