File Sharing: I can't get permissions to work!

[dmk1974]

I just set up a Mac Mini with an attached USB hard drive as my home media server machine (not the Mini server model, just the i7 2.3 desktop model).

The attached USB drive has all of our files and media that I want to share amongst the 3 other Macs in the house. I have 4 main folders on that drive (Files, Music, Photos, Videos).

I have set the following in the File Sharing section in System Preferences:

File Sharing: Checked
Shared Folders: Files, Music, Photos, Videos
Users: Me, Wife, Daughter

Access in the Users pane is set to:
Me: Read/Write for Files, Music, Photos, Videos
Wife: Read/Write for Files and Read Only for Photos, Videos
Daughter: Read Only for Photos, Videos

Problem is, when I log in from my wife's and daughter's Mac's with their appropriate Connect As settings, they each can see ALL 4 of the folders AND appear to have full Read/Write access to each. Shouldn't they only see what they have permission for, as well as the access restrictions? I can't get it for the life of me and hopefully there is something obvious I am missing and not setting correctly, but I just don't see it. I even completely disabled Guest access thinking that may have been it. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[DJLC]

I've found File Sharing to be extremely flaky in Lion and Mountain Lion (without server). At one of the offices I work for, we moved their shared data drive off the ailing Windows server and onto one of the Mac Mini workstations. It DOES work, but we often have to toggle File Sharing on and off to get the permissions to work right. Unfortunately ours tends to decide the opposite, and deny all users from connecting. A quick toggle (or reboot) generally fixes it.

(And FWIW, installing Server may help, but IMO it's just going to make things even flakier. Modern OS X Server is garbage.)

 

[aicul]

It DOES work, but we often have to toggle File Sharing on and off to get the permissions to work right.

I'm facing the same problem recently on my SL server. I've noticed that VNS screensharing will work and this can be used to STOP/START AFP. This avoids a full server restart.

But indeed this is not a long term solution.