Holy shit. I've just spent a few hours fixing permissions issues on the ReadyNAS. If anyone else is using or is planning to use an x86 ReadyNAS product, you might want to stay with firmware 4.2.5 if at all possible. Don't upgrade until something newer than 4.2.8 is available and you read in the forums that all permissions issues have been resolved.

4.2.7 which I've never run had some serious problems as per discussions in their forum. 4.2.8 suffers some permissions issues still. In an otherwise default setup, shares when accessed at least from a Mac via AFP or CIFS will have varying permissions depending on what "user" you connect with. And it's the reverse of what you might expect.

Guest access will have the most abilities and show less restrictive permissions than the default admin user or any user you might happen to create. Further, files copied to the NAS from Windows and then access on the Mac will show up without write permissions for anyone if using anything other than guest. Using guest will show that the owner can write, but that still won't help and you won't be able to modify the files.

To fix the issue I finally had to set the advanced permissions options for both AFP and CIFS so that the ReadyNAS changes permissions on all new files and folders to Read/Write for everyone. PLus I had to use the Advance tab on each share to also reset the permissions of all files/folders already on the drives to be read/write for everyone.

With these settings in place I can now copy to the shares and access the files/folders from either platform using either CIFS or AFP. CIFS seems to be faster even from the Mac however, so I'm not sure I'll keep AFP enabled for much longer - unless I can come up with another reason in the meantime.

So far the only issue I've encountered that still causes a permissions problem was when using the ReadyNAS to "backup" files from an external USB disk attached to itself. I cancelled the operation and the last folder and its enclosed two files didn't receive the updated advanced permissions. I guess the ReadyNAS changes them after copy operations are complete but didn't do this operation when closing down its copy process. This left me with a folder and two files that I was not able to delete or modify in any way, including changing permissions, regardless of what protocol I used to connect, Windows or Mac. I had to again use the advanced share tab to reset permissions on all files to fix these.

PITA.