Hello,

I'm running Mandrake 9.2 as a file server. I have two users who belong to the same group who access a file on the file server. The document (.xls spreadsheet) is set up so that both the owner and the group have full rights (read/write/execute), while others can just read it. Each time one of the owners goes into edit this .xls file, it changes the owner of the document to whomever opened it last, and makes it read-only for the other person. What's going on here?

Thanks in Advance!

Gunbunny

It sounds like you need to set the group sticky bit on the directory with:

That causes files to keep their group ownership when changed. This is different to setting the bit on the files in that directory. Have a look at http://rute.2038bug.com/node17.html.gz for more info on this. As an example, in my CVS repository I have several developers checking code into each directory. To keep things simple, I gave them group membership depending on the directories (corresponding to projects) I wanted them to have access to. A typical directory looks like:

But a file in that directory does not have the group sticky bit set, eg:

Just to make sure...group ownership doesn't change. It's the actual owner that changes. When one guy uses it, it has his name. When another uses it, it changes ownership to him, and then becomes read-only for the original guy. Original guy comes to me and tells me that it's read only again. Surely there must be a way for two people to share a file, having full access to it. They are members of the same group.

Both users are logging in directly aren't they? In other words they're not using samba to access the files. If they're using samba you can set create permissions for files and directories in /etc/samba/smb.conf.

If they are logging in directly, have a look at their umask and make sure that the group writable flag will be set. Usually the umask is 0022 which means directories get created 0755 and files get created 0644 - neither of which are group writable.

If the umask is 0002, setting g+s (lower case s) on a directory will force group ownership of created files to be the same as that of the directory.

You may have to run chgrp on the files in that directory once more, but that should (love that word) be everything.

Both users are actually connecting via Samba. I'll check the permissions in smb.conf, and get back to you. Thanks!