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January 28, 2008

security

Temporary Office 2008 helps you take back your files

Posted Jan. 28, ’08, 10:27 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Security

Office 2008On Friday, we tipped you to a problem with Microsoft’s Office 2008 installer where it would incorrectly assign ownership of the installed files to user id 502. Remain calm; there’s no need to panic. It’s not as if the Statue of Liberty’s head has come flying down the street or anything.

The team at Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (that’s MacBU to you) has issued a temporary fix for the file ownership snafu, though it doesn’t fix the problem that all the files are also set executable. Fire up Terminal in any administrator account and issue the following commands (on one line, each), entering your password when prompted:

/usr/bin/sudo /bin/chmod -R a-st “/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008” “/Library/Automator” “/Library/Fonts/Microsoft” “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft”

/usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/chown -h -R root:admin “/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008” “/Library/Automator” “/Library/Fonts/Microsoft” “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft”

So, that’s the fix. If you want to know more about this entire issue, our able-minded colleagues Dan Frakes and Rob Griffiths have put up an in-depth look over on the mothership.

Microsoft has stated that future versions of the Office 2008 discs will contain an updated installer that fixes the problem, and a downloadable patch is forthcoming for existing Office 2008 users.


2 Comments

Simon Warren said:

Even this had a mistake in it when it was first posted - a missing double qoute in the second command. I posted a comment on their web site. The mistake was corrected but I didn't get so much as a thank you. Very sloppy though to post a fix to such a high profile problem and not even test it first.

January 28, 2008 11:18 AM
Chris said:

I'm sorry to be a Captain Bringdown, but the glitches in Office 2008 for the Mac have only confirmed my decision never to buy another software product from Microsoft. I go into MUCH more detail on my blog:

http://www.orcutt.net/weblog/2008/01/goodbye_ms_word_you_whore.html

January 28, 2008 11:24 AM

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