Jeff, what does "custom access" mean in OSX? I've been trying to repair my read/write access for Adobe's CS3 (InCopy InDesign) and it doesn't seem to take. We also have a remote administrator who logs in and fools around with our installation on occasion, but who rarely shows up to actually talk to us and see what our troubleshooting inquiries are all about.

Is there a log of administrative actions that can be read? If so, is it accessible to administrators generally or only to the administrator logged on?

Thanks for any help you might be able to offer.

David

A good introduction to the concept of permissions is here:

http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorial...cedUnix/ugp/index.ws

Basically, if you have custom permissions set, you do not have the usual permissions set for the group to which you're assigned. I gather that someone else is controlling your permissions and not you, right?

Anyway, the usual solution is to log on under an ID with full permission rights (like the root or system account) and reset your permissions. Have you tried using the Disk Utility to fix permissions on your hard drive?

If the problem is just with those Adobe products, you might be able to restore the default permissions simply by trashing the preferences files for those products. New preferences will be recreated when you relaunch. Might be a good idea to make a copy of those files before you do this, though, in case it doesn't work or you really need some of the preference settings.

Jeff/CompGuy

Thanks Jeff.

I work part-time for a small newspaper in a group of 4 weeklies. The other 3 are produced in a town about 15 miles across the water and up the road (we can't get on or off our island without taking a ferry or our own boat). Our office is a stepchild, and we get little attention as a rule.

The group's guru swooped in on Friday last week and told my boss he had upgraded our server software remotely and messed up my permissions inadvertently; the problem appears to have been resolved this week.

I tried last week to reset permissions with disk utility but it wanted an admin account. I've since cribbed one to use for such purposes.