As we all know, OS X is very finicky when it comes to file privileges. Only if you have the owner and group just right can a file be opened by the process that should open it. When your FileMaker Server is on OS X, then you need to make sure that the permissions on the FileMaker files are correct after you move them to the server. This movie explains how to do that. To be clear, we're talking about the operating system permissions here, not privileges that is set inside the FileMaker file. Let's have a look at the permissions on the sample file that comes with FileMaker Server and you can find it inside the FileMaker Server Installation Library, FileMaker Server, Data, Databases Sample Folder and there is the Sample File. Let's use Get Info to have a look at the file privileges. As you can see at the bottom here, the owner is FM Server of group FMS Admin and that's how FileMaker Server expects the privileges to be before we can open the file. So let's go have a look at the new file that we've created and use the same Get Info. As we can see, I am the current owner and this is my group. The same thing will happen if you move a file from a network share onto the FileMaker Server running on OS X. It'll take the privileges of the currently logged-in user. So what happens if we move this file to the FileMaker Server Folder? That's the location that FileMaker Server expects the file to be, so let's go have a look at the Admin Console and we can see that the file already shows up here and the status is closed just like we expected to after moving a file into the proper folder. So let's go ask FileMaker to host that file. As we can see, the status goes to Normal but none of the checkmarks indicate that the file is available to either FileMaker Pro instant web publishing or any of the other technologies. So let's have a look at the Event Log. FileMaker Server Events. As we can see here, we have a warning and the warning is that this file, the file that we've just moved, can not be shared. No account has the necessary extended privileges, that's the FM App Bit and FM App could not be added to the full-access privilege set. And while FileMaker Server tries to open the file, it'll later report that the file is open as read-only. If we try and connect to this file from a copy of FileMaker Pro, nothing will show up. So let's close the file again. What we will need to do now is set the privileges on this file the way FileMaker Server expects them. So we'll go to Get Info, we'll make sure that we have the rights to change the privileges and we need to change the owner of the group to FM Server of group of FMS Admin. But as you see, the Get Info does not allow us to do that because the FM Server account and FMS Admin Group were not exposed here. So we'll have to use something else and for that we use the excellent freeware utility called Batchmod. We know we have the file closed in FileMaker Server so we can just drag and drop the file onto our utility and we'll change the owner to FM Server of group FMS Admin. Make sure that both the owner and the group have read and write privileges and everybody else can just read the file. So we'll apply those privileges and there we go. Now let's go back to the Admin Console and try to re-open that file. There we go. The status of the file goes to Normal and we have the checkmark that says that the file is available for FileMaker Pro clients. If we go to the Log Viewer and refresh our view, we see that the file has been properly opened. And FileMaker Server has added the FM App Bit to the full-access privilege set. So that's what happens when you move a file manually to the FileMaker Server, move it into the FileMaker Server Databases Folder and then try to open it. What happens if you use the new upload feature from the Admin Console? Well, if you do that the whole problem goes away. We already know that FileMaker Server will add the FM App privilege set bit to any privilege set that doesn't have it, at the one, the full-access one. But FileMaker Server will also take care of setting the user and the group to FM Server and FMS Admin when you use the upload feature. So the conclusion is that you can still move a file manually to FileMaker Server. If your FileMaker Server is on OS X, you have to make sure that the privileges set on the file, operating system privileges are set correctly. The whole problem goes away if you use the upload feature from the FileMaker Server Admin Console.