From Reed Jackson:

Hello,

I am often asked how to get Accelerated Reader configured to work on an OS X Server. I continue to see sites that are using an AppleShare file server because the site was unsuccessful in configuring Mac OS X Server to host their ALS data sharepoint.

It is most often because the site did not change the OS X Sharepoint in to an “Inherit Permissions” share.

On OS X Server 10.1 and later, when creating a sharepoint, the sharepoint can be specified to either “Use standard Unix behavior” or “Inherit Permissions”. When a sharepoint inherits permissions, any new item, or any item that is saved to this shared area, will be owned by the owner of the sharepoint. Contrast that to “Use standard Unix behavior”: any new item or any item that is saved to this shared area will be owned by the user who is logged in to the Mac OS X workstation when the item is saved to the sharepoint.

As you can see, the items saved in the second example (“Use standard Unix behavior”) will be a real problem for a product like Accelerated Reader. Once a config file, or a data file, is opened by a user connected to that share, and then re-written (or in-other-words the item is “saved”) it will from that point foreword be owned by that user who first launched and ran Accelerated Reader. No one else will be able to make changes to that critical file.

When deploying Accelerated Reader or any other network-based applications, pay attention to whether the shared resource files on the server are going to accessed by multiple users simultaneously, or even serially. Most network based apps have some portion of their structure that work this way, in those cases use the “Inherit Permissions” protocol setting.

Don’t use Inherit permissions, if you are sharing a group area where you WANT all new items to be owned by the person who created them. This secures the files to “at-least” disallow anyone else from over-writing the user’s files and folders. It does not preclude others from reading these files however.