I have a person who is trying to use a shared database with Panorama 6 and Mojave. When she opens a file she gets a message that the server is locked or busy. The server is 4,000 miles away from her location and many others are connected to it with no problem, however, she is the only one using Mojave. Another weird issue is that she is logged into her Mac as an administrator but she can’t set the hard drive to read and write for everybody. It seems like some sort of permissions issue on top of the OS thinking that the server is locked. Has anybody experienced this?
Are you sure the message says that the SERVER is locked or busy? Could you get the exact error message from her? I don’t think there is an error message that says that. But a permissions issue can definitely cause a message that a database is locked or busy. This has nothing to do with the server, it is simply a report that macOS is telling Panorama that local file cannot be modified. If Panorama can’t modify the local file, it can’t open it from the local hard disk, which also means it can’t open it for sharing.
I had her repeat the message several times as I have never heard of a server error message being generated by a local file before. Actually, they are sending me the Mac so i can figure out what’s going on.
Yep, she was right. Lets say the enterprise server name was Africa. The error message was “File Africa server on disk may be locked or busy. Unlock and try again” followed by the message, "File Africa server could not be deleted. [Call from in].
She was using Mojave. The only way I got those errors to stop was to reset the Users folder permissions with Terminal.
But, there was still a pesky error. The .Initialize procedure had a line of code to “open Op Center Resources” which is a photoshop resource file. That was also throwing a disk error error. Once I took out that line of code, all was good.
So this was a garden variety file permissions error, having nothing to do with the server other than the unfortunate coincidence that the file that had the permission problem was the configuration file for the server. If you are using Panorama Server and look in this folder
you’ll see that there is a file for each server you have ever connected to. So in this case there will be a file named Africa Server in that folder, and apparently the permissions were messed up. However, unless Panorama is installed in her Users folder, I don’t see how resetting the Users folder permissions would help, this file is normally in the /Applications folder.
If you look closely at the error messages you can see that the problem is a file, not anything network related. The error message said “File Africa Server on disk …” It’s trying to tell you that the problem is with a file. When that happens, the problem is almost always a permissions issue. (The fact that the name of this particular file happens to contain the word server is entirely besides the point in this case.)
The Op Center Resources file most likely also has a permission problem. If you don’t need any of the resources in that file, by all means remove that line of code, but normally the fix would be to reset the permissions on that file.
I replaced, reset and verified the permissions on that file several times. My thought was that Mojave didn’t like that particular resource file. I’m sure it was from an old version of PhotoShop, though I didn’t create it.
In addition to regular permissions, recent versions of macOS also support ACL’s (access control list). I don’t really know how to manipulate these, but I know that it is possible to do so in the Terminal.
I wasn’t aware that PhotoShop could create a resource file, but perhaps that is a feature I just didn’t know about. In my experience, resource files were created with a specialized program like ResEdit or Resourcerer. A resource file is kind of like a special type of folder that can contain other types of information inside it – photos, sounds, menus, code, etc. In fact, before OS X every application was a resource file. OS X introduced a new feature with a similar purpose, a bundle file. Bundles are more flexible than resource files, in fact a bundle is actually a folder with a special flag telling the Finder to handle the folder as if it was a file. So anything at all can be put in a bundle. Bundles eliminated the need for resource files, so they are no longer used in modern applications. However, support for resource files was still included up to 10.14, I think they are no longer supported in 10.15 since that was a 32 bit API.
I wonder if your Op Center Resources file is simply damaged? For example, if you transferred it to a USB stick formatted for Windows, then back to the Mac, the contents of the resource file would be lost. I think that might cause a disk error like you are seeing. That would happen on any version of macOS, not just Mojave.
That leaves the puzzle of why the resource file was there in the first place. If the database was opening this resource file, one would expect it to use it to display images, custom menus, or something similar. I’m surprised you can simply remove this line of code without impacting the operation of the database in any way. Perhaps the file now opens ok but a problem would show up if you tested all of the features of the database.