Put on your thinking caps – this is a tough one.

Blisterphish

Registered
Read this closely because it is not an easy one and I’ve done what I think is due diligence in troubleshooting it.

I have a user who accesses a shared network folder along with 30 other users with the same read/write permissions. The shared folder lives on the company SAN and the volume is presented by an HP server. Her machine is a dual 867MHz G4 with 512M of RAM running OSX 10.2.8.

Here are the symptoms:

When she first mounts the volume she is able to read and modify the files inside with no problem but after about 5 minutes she loses the ability to do anything but read(open). When right clicking any of the folders or files contained in the volume the Copy, Move, Delete, Make Duplicate and so on options are not visible at all. The space in the menu is there but the text is missing. In the first 5 minutes these items are available. The other options such as Open in “insert app here” are available at all times but the modify options disappear after the 5 minutes leaving just blank spaces in the menu. It appears that the Finder is having difficulty with this volume. If I relaunch the finder the volume is useable again for, you guessed it, 5 minutes before this begins again. The time it takes for the finder to puke is not exactly 5 minutes but close-ish Weird stuff.

In an effort to figure this out I’ve done the following:

Dismounted the network volume and reconnected using administrator credentials; same results after the 5 minutes.

Logged out and back in under the administrator profile. This works fine even when I mount the network volume with the user’s credentials. There is no problem even after the 5 minutes.

With this in mind I deleted the user’s profile off the Mac and recreated it. The same stupid thing still happens after 5 minutes when logged into the Mac under her profile.

What this comes down to is that the problem only occurs on one machine and with one user profile (even after deleting and recreating). The credentials used to log into the server do not seem to matter as I was able to use her login and password to mount the volume while under the admin profile and it worked great. If however, I use the admin credentials to mount the volume while logged in under her profile it bugs out after the 5 minutes.

Could this be a corrupted cache file that is not deleted when the profile is deleted?
I’ve also repaired permissions and run a disk repair while booted from a Firewire drive.

Show me what you got. :)
 
I just rebuilt the stupid thing from scratch and it's fine now. Must have been some corruption in the system files.
 
Not actually a solution, but you should consider upgrading the user to at least Panther (10.3), since Jaguar is no longer supported by Apple even for security updates.

Tiger would be even better ;)
 
I can only go so long without getting a production machine back on line so I had to do it.

I agree with you on the upgrade. Sell that to my cheapo IT director. I will be in your debt.
 
I guess you can explain to him (with proof, of course) that running 10.2 will cause possibly security issues that he would be responsible for, somthing I'm sure upper management wouldn't be happy about. I'm sure that would change his mind quickly enough. ;)
 
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