10.5: Join 'wheel' group as possible fix for system issues

Apr 07, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

As many would be aware, and many may be suffering from, 10.5 and in particular 10.5.2, has been causing many people headaches with permissions and ownership of files and folders, particularly temporary folders. This has been causing odd problems ranging from failed software installs, script errors, Preview silently failing to open images, and a biggie for me, the GUI version (but not the command line version) of Software Update failing with a -3001 error, referencing a network failure.

In various forums around the usual places, many working band-aids involving a chown here, a chmod there, or up to and including an Eerase-and-reinstall have been used to alleviate the suffering.

After much frustration and poking around, I finally noticed that my login was no longer part of group wheel. I understand from various forum posts that under 10.5 this was not required of an admin user. However, after I added myself back to group wheel, all my symptoms have vanished, without having to do a re-install at this time. It would seem the update installs don't have a clear migration path for these permissions yet.

Given that NetInfo is now gone, and editing Unix config files is just plain anathema, the easiest way to do this sort of operation is to download Apple's Server Admin Tools package, as described in this hint. This may be an incomplete panacea, and a more complete understanding of both current and future plans for the permissions structure are necessary, but it sure did save me from a lot of work.

[robg adds: I haven't had any permissions-related issues since installing 10.5, and that includes one machine (my MacBook Pro) where I did my first-ever upgrade install (I typically do clean installs only). If you have had issues, though, it'd be interesting to know if this hint helped you out at all. Alternatively, if you know of a different cause and solution, and this hint isn't applicable at all, please post that as well!]

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