I wrote a simple Java application that reads and writes journals (encrypted text files) for a small company “XYZ”. The journals are stored on an OS X server and all client computers access the journals on this server through an ethernet connection. Another independent company, “ABC”, installed and configured the network and its nodes. Company XYZ are having lots of problems with loss of data when writing journals to disk. The most likely cause seems to be that when a user creates a new journal, that user gets read/write permissions to the journal, but all other users only get read permissions. So, when user A tries to edit a journal created by user B, the application tries to write the journal to disk, but it has insufficient permissions to do so. ACL permissions are used.
Is there anything I as a software developer can or should do with this problem, or is this purely a server/network administration problem? Is there anything I should be doing or can do in the application code to make sure this works as it should?
Complain loudly. Catch failures and make the user aware of them.
Changing the permissions on the files so that anyone with the appropriate group could read and write to them is a good step too, but that sounds like it’s outside the realm of Java.