Home Directory Permission Fix Sought

Question

I have a problem with one of my file sharing servers - an XServe running 10.5.4, where all the user's home directories now show owner as _unknown in the POSIX permissions. ACLs appear to be OK. The problem is that users can see each other's files if they go to open and save dialog boxes in applications.
Someone mentioned a script to fix on Apple Support phone call, but we are unable to Goggle it. fixhomedirperm.sh is the script name. Can someone assist us?

Answer 1

If you are comfortable with the Terminal, you can ssh to the Share Point and run something like this one-liner:
for i in `ls -d *`; do chown -R $i:staff $i; chmod -R 700 $i; done
You should do this as root, or as an administrative user. If done as an administrative user, use "sudo" before the chown and chmod commands:
for i in `ls -d *`; do sudo chown -R $i:staff $i; sudo chmod -R 700 $i; done
All this does is list the directories within the share point, which for a User Home Directory folder should be a bunch of folders named with the users' short names. Then, it loops through the directories, changes the owner (chown) of all files within the directory to the user short name (and the group to "staff", the default group), then changes the permissions (chmod) so that only the user can see files within his or her home directory.
This assumes that a) Your user home directories are all named with the user's short name, and b) That you want the permissions to be set so that no one else can see inside the user's home directory. This nixes things like user dropboxes in their accounts and websites served from the user's home directory.
I would suggest trying the one-liner on a directory with the same folder structure as the share point for a test.