File share temporarily unresponsive after permissions change.

[Carl S]

Hello,

I'm looking for some help. At our organization, we have a singular file
share that all of our departments use. They each have a folder at the root
of that share and have only the permissions that they need to access their
data. A problem we've been having lately is that, when we change permissions
on a folder, the entire share freezes up and become inaccessible. Explorer
also seems to hang. This will last several minutes and then the server will
act normally again. No errors are logged. This seems to happen regardless
if the permission that I am changing inherits or not.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Carl

[Jonathan de Boyne Pollard]

[...] when we change permissions on a folder [...]

Hypothesis #1: You aren't actually doing that, as you claim. But
instead you are changing the ACLs on that folder and all of its
subfolders. And there are a lot of subfolders.

[Carl S]

Here is my process:
I am making the changes through the explorer GUI and not cacls. When adding
a new permissions, I go in to 'Advanced' and verify that the new permission
says: Apply to 'This folder only'.

I am doing it this way because this is an old file share that has grown wild
over time (since long before I began administering it) and many folders are
configured to inherit permissions from the parent. We are in the middle of
the long process of wrangling in the share and converitng it to an AGDLP
model.

So, if applying ACLs to subfolders is the cause, is there a better practice
for me to follow? Does the 'inherit permission from parent' override the
'This folder only' setting?

More importantly, I would have thought that the Windows would be able to
multitask a process like applying ACLs rather than become totally
unresponsive. Is that not the case?

Server specs as I forgot to include them:
Windows 2003 R2
2x Xeon 3.2Ghz
2GB RAM
File share is on a Lefthand iSCSI SAN connected via iSCSI Initiator.

Thanks,
Carl
--
Carl S

Post by Jonathan de Boyne Pollard

[...] when we change permissions on a folder [...]

Hypothesis #1: You aren't actually doing that, as you claim. But
instead you are changing the ACLs on that folder and all of its
subfolders. And there are a lot of subfolders.
.