Permission problems in OS X 10.3 Server

I cannot for the life of me figure out why this is happening. Here's the scenario: One server, a G4 running OS X 10.3. It has an external RAID array that stores all our stuff hooked up to it and mounted, in addition to its own hard drive and 4 FireWire drives we use for Retrospect backups. We have my (I'm not proud of it) PC, 3 G5's and a handful of G4's all using this RAID as an office storage drive.

For whatever reason, the permissions are screwed up. There's a bunch of share points correctly setup in the workgroup admin on the server. We have two workgroups..employees and freelance, and everything's setup accordingly. However, when someone creates (or modifies) say..an illustrator file, and then someone else wants to open it (after it's closed on the original machine), someone has to go back to the server, "Get Info" on the files, and set the permissions from Employees-Read Only to Read and Write. In general, if someone accesses a folder and opens a file, and someone else accesses that same folder and wants to drop another file into it (even a totally different one), the second user will not have permission and will have to get up, go back to the server, and reset permissions for that folder. I've found also that using the "apply to contents of this folder" button doesn't apply to subfolders or their contents..only the immediate contents.

Apple is smarter than this, and I know there's a way to fix it but I have no idea where to start. Any ideas??
Thanks!

I don't think it is an Apple problem, but a unix problem. What I see is the way unix handle file permissions. I think the problem is what the umask is set to for each user.

rman said:

I don't think it is an Apple problem, but a unix problem. What I see is the way unix handle file permissions. I think the problem is what the umask is set to for each user.

Click to expand...

Makes sense I guess. I'm familiar with Unix/Linux..however I prefer GUI-type solutions if they are available. If this is indeed a problem that reaches to the core of the OS..how does one go about fixing this issue? I'm certain there has to be a way..these are Macs not PCs!

The only thing I've seen so far is modifying a few files for a different umask value. I have no idea if there are any adverse effects of this..only that the procedure seems more in depth than I can believe. I appreciate the OS' robustness...however the core of Apple is being user friendly. Are you all sure this isn't a problem that can be addressed in the GUI or with some sort of available program/script?
If so, where can I get it?

I have not worked with OS X server, so I am not sure what is available in managing user ids. Being a Unix System Administrator, I am use to managing user ids on various flavors of unix. So I am looking at your problem from a pure unix stand point. So I don't know if there is a graphical solution to your problem.

Basically what you would do is set the correct file permissions on the directory structure and adjust the umask for each user id.

I've had similar problems using the get info command. It was resolved when I logged in as root and performed the get info command to reset permissions.