It was found that the default UMASK on the newer Debian workstations were different from the Ubuntu12/14 machines (022 on debian, 002 on ubuntu). This meant that the default file permissions for new files on debian were 644 (rw-r--r--) and therefore not group writable. We are changing the default umask for user-type accounts to be 002 on all machines (via  pam_umask), and I have appended a line to everyone's .bashrc file to set "umask 002" as an OS-agnostic method of ensuring correct permissions.

If you want to check if your account is setup correctly, first check your umask setting by  typing the umask command

david.barker@zotws2: umask
0002

As a further check, create a new file and verify the correct permissions (rw-rw-r--)

david.barker@zotws2: touch testfile
david.barker@zotws2: ls -al testfile
-rw-rw-r-- 1 david.barker controls 0 Nov 15 16:15 testfile
 

and finally verify you belong to the controls group as your secondary group

david.barker@zotws2: groups
david.barker controls