Word for Mac “Save” Errors
After migrating the home directories on Windows and Mac to network mounts at $dayjob, Word for Mac started behaving badly when someone tried to save a file, giving vague errors about incorrect permissions or file naming. It turns out that Word wants to write temporary data in a folder called “/.TemporaryItems” for each user, and since the root that contained all the home directories was read only, it was failing. The solution for $dayjob was to create the “.TemporaryItems” folder, chgrp it to a user group everyone is part of, and chmod 770 it. No more Word file save errors!
Here’s some references where I found out about Word’s lust for a “/.TemporaryItems” directory.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302979
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CantSaveToServer.html
Since all my Mac users auth using LDAP, and Windows auth is through Samba->LDAP, $dayjob already has globally unique UIDs on all platforms. All I had to do was create the directory it was looking for and make it group writable.