Address Book Solution to Some iChat Problems
Address Book Solution to Some iChat Problems
Address Book Fix
This item was posted on the Apple Discussion Pages and is quoted here verbatim. It contains the original post and a reply to it which adds a short cut.
It is Panther (10.3.x based) and I have never heard of anyone needing it in Tiger.
Posted by pdX on 26th August 2004 on the Apple Discussion Pages (EDIT: This was in the Old Discussions pre 14th Nov 2005 and has ben archived off the main Board)
The Post
"I experienced a rather serious permissions problem after updating to 10.3.5 and turning on FileVault prior to testing everything out. I don't know which one was responsible, but I'm putting my money on FileVault, since it changes many permissions within the home directory. The problems were that when Mail launched, it appeared that I had no messages. Address Book didn't launch at all, either from the finder or from the mini-address book in Mail. Instead, it prompted me with a message saying that Address Book's database is corrupt. Well, both unfortunate issues were resolvable without resorting to back ups. After much trial and error, here's how.
MAIL FIX
After exploring the folders a bit, I found that most of my problems had to do with new permissions settings which locked me out of my own mail folder -- set to System with NO ACCESS. Changing these one-by-one for every folder within the main User/Library/Mail folder did the trick. The button that says change permissions for all enclosed items doesn't seem to work very consistently.
ADDRESS BOOK FIX
Address book seemed to be another beast, and took me much longer to resolve.
But here's how it ended up.
The problem was that, along with the visible files, one or two invisible files inside my User/Library/Application Support/Address Book/ folder had NO ACCESS permissions applied to them. So the fix was to change the permissions to your user name and READ & WRITE. The easiest way to toggle the visibility of the invisible files is to try out or buy Cocktail (a nearly perfect app for what it does). After turning invisible items on, locate the above folder and apply corrected permissions to the following files:
Be certain to do the same to all other files in that folder. For me, after making this correction, I could immediately launch and access my entire address book. A good time to backup!"
- .database.lockN
- .DS_Store
- .skIndex.ABPerson.lockN
Posted by pdX on 26th August 2004 on the Apple Discussion Pages
The Reply
A reply a bneely seems to suggest that some of the file for the Address Book Problem can be deleted rather than have the onwership changed
"Regarding the Address Book folder,
the .DS_Store is a file created by Finder that can be deleted.
Finder will re-create it when necessary.
The same is true with the .database.lockN and .skIndex.ABPerson.lockN files that are created by Address Book.
Before deleting those, it is best to quit all applications (except Finder). Then, delete the files and let them be re-created by Address Book (or any client of its framework) when necessary.
These operations can also be performed with /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app if you know the unix commands like 'chmod' and 'chown', in addition to 'cd', 'ls', and 'rm'."
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© 2005 Ralph Johns Edited 24/9/2005, 5/5/2006, 25/08/2007
Updated September 2006. Moved to Gargoyles and edited Mar 2007
Information Column
This is about a particular fix for iChat that involves work with sorting out the Address Book.
I have only seen it with iChat 2.
It is so rare that this page does not appear in the menu and can only be reached from page 13.
