Perforce: Protected namespace access denied

I ran into this error when I was creating a new clientspec and tried to checkout a new tree with this clientspec. I was using

p4 sync ...

Protected namespace ... access denied

Found out through debugging that this error was not being generated due to a problem with the permissions on the local directory but rather because the clientspec was incorrectly pointing to a non-existing path on the repository. You are trying to access some part of the repo that is not setup or you dont have permissions to access. Run p4 client and fix the clientspec, and things should work.

Fix the client spec and things work.