Apple releases privilege restoration utility
Jun 26, '02 08:11:48AM
Contributed by: robg
Apple's Knowledge Base article 106900 covers their new "Repair Privileges" utility. This little application is designed to restore privileges that have been incorrectly set, due to any number of causes (user error, bad installers, etc.). Here's a list of the problems that the utility will fix (shamelessly lifted right from the Knowledge Base article):
- "An error of type -192" alert message in Disk Copy when disk images fail to become available.
- An error of type -108" alert message in Print Center when spooling print jobs.
- "You are running Classic without superuser (root) Privileges" alert message when trying to start up Classic and the System Folder is blessed.
- An Admin user cannot drag files to a folder to which they should have write access, for example, the Applications folder.
- Files are unexpectedly locked and cannot be unlocked in the Finder.
The utility can be downloaded from the Knowledge Base page, and it requires 10.1.5.
I have not tried this program myself, but I imagine that it resets all permissions to their default state. This could cause, for example, sendmail to fail again, as its permissions would be changed back to the "unsafe" default settings. But if you're having one of the above issues, this utility looks like a good solution to the problem -- the other alternative is to try to manually identify which files and/or folders have their permissions set incorrectly.
If anyone has used this program, please post your experiences!
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