MANAGER@SMITH.BITNET (Mary Malmros) (12/07/87)
Greetings, gurus, and HELP! I've got some directories that I protect with ACLS. Periodically I need to grant access to these directories to a new user. This is done with a periodic batch queue that executes a command file and adds ACEs for the requested people. So far so good. The problem is that sometimes the ACL on one of these directories gets munged somehow, causing the directory to be (as near as I can tell) TOTALLY INACCESSIBLE. You can't look at, much less use, the files in the directory; you can't copy anything; and you can't delete or rename the directory. All of these operations result in an error message SYS-F-IVACL, Invalid Access Control List. I can't even find this error message in _System Messages_ so I'm even more confused. Since it seemed that nothing could be done with the directory, I restored the directory from backup, but with a different name, and changed logical names, symbols, etc, accordingly. So far it's just unpleasant; now it gets weird. Both times that his has happened to me, the problem seems to have cured itself, and I have no idea how. Meanwhile, everybody's screaming and shouting and trying to figure out why things don't work right, and where their favorite software resides THIS week, and what their symbols point to. So...if you've got any clue about what I'm doing wrong and how I can fix it, I would greatly appreciate it if you'd tell me. Mary Malmros Smith College