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Lucid Nonsense

A request for Adobe

Not that this will make a blind bit of difference when compared to the thousands of people that have already begged for these but please Adobe can you:

• Release standard installer packages for the Creative Suite.

• Realise that in the real world businesses sometimes just need to use network shares to work from and saying “we don’t support using the Creative Suite on a network share” doesn’t help much. Version Cue isn’t an answer for everyone either.

• Stop finding new and interesting ways to break. Seriously do you have a special department that hunts for these things? There isn’t a single other app that we come across that manages to conspire with the OS to create problems at such levels, with such frequency, as managed by various incarnations of Creative Suite. I’m sure Apple share some of the blame with at least a portion of these issues but with worrying regularity CS makes Quark Xpress look stable and dependable. The concern that this should raise in people who’ve worked with Macs for a while should not be underestimated.

  We’re still getting issues with Macs and AFP privilege mapping, which shouldn’t be, and doesn’t appear to be, being used (the server and the client share the same directory service). CS3 apps are still kicking off though. Now I know it may be an obscure problem with AFP, but when the setup is like this no other apps ever have this problem. Even chmod works fine and that’s given as an example of something that might break! As soon as you run the following on the AFP server the problem disappears.

  sudo serveradmin settings afp:noNetworkUsers = yes
  

  From experiencing a problem years ago with AFP volumes hosted on an Xsan volume, I’d wager a guess that this is something to do with a way that some CS apps save files. Now I’m pretty sure that I got some info from Apple back then about a Carbon exchangeforks primitive, but the only thing I can find about that via Google are things I’ve posted elsewhere, so at risk of quoting myself I’ll just say; CS3 still seems to be saving files differently from most apps, and that’s just a bit odd really.

It is probably worth highlighting that all of these problems are related to larger scale deployments of Creative Suite, and I know that in smaller studios and for individual designers Adobe’s collection of apps seems to run very well indeed. There is just a tipping point where past 15 users or so, CS just becomes increasingly difficult to administer.

[Update] I’ve realised I managed to whinge about the afp privilege mapping problem above without giving any indication of what it actually is, which is not entirely helpful I admit. The problem manifests itself with users experiencing various errors relating to not having permission to save a previously created file if they are not the owner (i.e. normally the creator) of the file. Group permissions or ACLs may be set to allow them to write to the file and other apps will have no problems on the same share. According to the effective permissions inspector in Server Admin, and by every other tool you can run, the CS apps should have no problem saving the file. Instead you will get an error along the lines of “File is locked in the Finder”. Turning off AFP privilege mapping as above solves this issue. I have seen this problem in the CS3 versions of Photoshop, Bridge, Flash and InDesign.