Problems opening attachments with Entourage & Network Home Folders

[antonstewart]

Hello good people, this is my first post!

I finally took the plunge and joined AFP548 in the hopes that I might get an answer to an odd-ball situation I’m experiencing right now (although, I must admit to having browsed the forums for a few years now).

So here’s the situation… I’m running OS X Server 10.4.11 on a XServe G5 with Network Home Folders residing on a fiber channel attached XServe RAID. Clients are a mixture of machines – PPC G4 MDDs up to Intel Core Duo iMacs – but all run OS X 10.4.11

Back in November of last year, around the time I updated to 10.4.11 and Security Update 2007-8, I also updated office to 10.3.9. Everything seemed absolutely fine at first, then gradually (and with increasing frequency) problems opening attachments started to occur and, to make matters worse, seemingly at random!

The symptoms are when a user tries to open an attachment, by double clicking on it from within Entourage, the operation sometimes fails and Entourage displays a dialog stating
“Could not open attachment. Permission to access this file was denied. This could be caused by the file being open in another application.” Dismissing the dialog and retrying the operation may work immediately or (more often) after 2 or 3 attempts. Clicking the ‘Save’ button often generates the same error, however, dragging the attachment to the desktop and opening it from there works every time. Perhaps most troubling is that this is not limited to just one user, it happens to every every single user to a lesser or greater degree.

I have been looking into this problem for quite a while now and evidence would seem to suggest that the frequency of the problem is directly proportional to the size of the user’s Entourage database, many or which are necessarily large (Avg. 0.75GB with the biggest over 3.2GB). Also I discovered that Entourage performs exactly the same operation whether opening or saving an attachment – as double clicking the attachment causes a file to be saved (albeit temporarily) in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Saved Attachments

As the error dialog mentioned permissions that was my first line of inquiry, however, everything seems OK. The Saved Attachments folder is world writable with 777 permissions and every attachment file saved within is being created with the correct (644) permissions. Also, at the time the error dialog is displayed, the file does not yet exist (as far as I can tell) so I think the whole permissions thing might be a red herring.

I thought I’d found a fix by clearing the contents of ~/Library/Caches, but sadly not quite! While the problem has gone away for the people who are less active on Entourage, it recurred very quickly for the extremely active users.

Thus far I have been largely unsuccessful in finding any further information about this problem – but I’d be amazed if I am the only person to experience it.

So, over to you good folks out there… if you can throw any light on the subject I would be immensely grateful. And no, I certainly won’t be offended by anyone stating the obvious… sometimes the obvious is easily overlooked.

Thanks in advance – Anton

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