Missing permissions on SPFolders: Access denied for SharePoint\System

Question

I've been investigating an issue recently where the system/farm account received Native Code HRESULT Access Denied exceptions from SPRequest trying to access several folders in a large list.

Deep analysis shows that there are about 200 thousand items separated in folders according to recommendations and there are about 670 unique permissions in the site collection and 6 (six) SPFolders have NULL Permisions assigned according to the TVF used there (by ScopeId).

[Update] 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR is rendered when browsing to these folders [/Update]

The 6 SPFolders appear to have NO permissions assigned: looked into a copy of content DB table Perms and view Docs where left-joining by ScopeId gives NULL on the Perms side. Actually there are matches in Perms where Perms.ScopeUrl = Docs.DirName+'/'+Docs.LeafName but ScopeIds differ.

How should I get on with it?

Answer 1

You could try setting a web application policy to give yourself (or someone else) permissions and then browse to the folders to set the proper permissions on it.

Answer 2

I've experienced the same problem a year ago with combination large library + lot of permissions and pretty much just gave up. I suggest calling MS for support on how to do this, perhaps they can fix the database.

P.S. I Tried evertything permission wise and nothing helped, not even logging as the service account for the app pool itself.

Answer 3

It was a while ago, and the database was already unsupportable, but we fixed it by finding the scopes with missing perms or vice versa in a backup and resetting the ACL to that of parent container with a SQL UPDATE query. As this is unsupported, any further details could only be provided privately.