So, here's the deal. My boss went on vacation, leaving me in charge of our department's systems. I'm still a student, know very little about Linux, and am frankly kinda lost.

He has things set up so that we have our server running Red Hat, and all of our users accessing their files, etc. via Windows XP and Samba. Everything was working great before, but now, whenever anybody tries to access a file of theirs (which I know they have permissions for because /etc/group is all set up correctly), Windows says it's "Read Only." I know this isn't the case, because these files are usually accessible, and only recently have changed to read only.

I can't think of anything I've done that could have changed this. I added myself to a couple of the admin groups so that I had more access for other aspects of the job, and did a "chmod 755 <fileserver>" because when I first started, nobody could access anything. I tried different chmod combos on the server and the offending files themselves, and none of them seems to work.

I realize this is vague, but does anybody have any ideas as to what the cause might be? And bear in mind, I essentially have no idea what I'm doing, so if I have to access and change "RandomFilexxx," if you could tell me where I might find that file, that would be fab.

Thanks for any help you've got.

Update:

Apparently, I can't access the files at all. I try to save, it says they're read only. I try to save a copy, it says that "Copy of Blah Blah.doc is not a valid file name." I try to open the file's properties, changing stuff (the "Read Only" box is NOT checked, by the way), and when I try to save the Properties, access is denied.

This sounds like a permissions thing to my admittedly noobish sensibilities. What could I change to make these more accessible?

when you say "chmod 755"
that gives
owner - read write execute
group - read execute (read only)
others - read execute (read only)

you might mean
chmod 664
that would give read and write to owner and group and read only to others
if you want the chmod to be recursive use
chmod -R 664

there are also settings in smb.conf for access permissions

I doubt that's it, because I've given files 777 access and they still can't be accessed/saved/etc.


Haha, this is one of those problems that I kind of hope just goes away for a week...

I wasn't able to follow were you changed the permissions. Was it in the partition that is shared?

Usually changes are made in the configuration files for samba such as samba.conf and /etc/sysconfig/samba.

Does your red-hat server have a service that logs changes made to file permissions. On mandrake, mcc does that. I don't know what Red Hat uses however. If you can find this information, you can find what was changed to reverse things.

What changes were made before the original access problem?