Configuring a NFS shares and accessing them via Windows 7?

[senior_hombre]

Hi,
i am new to FreeNAS and so i read the documentation but there a lot of questions left and in some cases it just is not giving enough information to solve my problems.

At first i will describe what i want, i want to create basically 3 shares (using NFS).
One of them is a "public" directory to which every one in the network (even quest without any accounts or login information) should have access to (writing and reading), two others are personal home directorys to which only one user has access to (two users each has it own home directory) both users are currently using windows 7 but are switching to linux in the near future (thats why i want NFS).

Now my problems:
1. the documentation says: "Create a guest account that everyone will use" http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Users the "funny" thing is, there is no explanation how to create such a guest account (which special settings it needs, what distinguishes it from normal users and so on)

2. i created a NFS share as described in the documentation but sadly most fields do not give any examples so i left the mapall and maproot fields at N/A (i found examples setting the maproot to root or the mapall to some kind of nonexistent user, but thats not what i want). Remember: i want to have two shares and each should be only accessable by a special user and noone else (except maybe by root).
Anyway i let it at N/A and only changed the path to one of my users home directory (a dataset with the user as owner) and the Authorized networks to: 192.168.0.0/24 to allow only acces from my local network.
Then i used this tutorial: http://www.hackourlife.com/mount-linux-nfs-share-on-windows-7/
to get access to the directory from a windows 7 pc. But there are the following problems:
2.1 i have access from every pc i do not get asked for a username and password
2.2 maybe this has to do with 2.2 but i can only see the files in it, i cannot create new ones and when trying to open one of the files already in it i simply get the error message that i cannot access the file.

Ok so you can see i did already tried to get it going but i think i cannot achieve what i want without help.
3. What do i have to change or set up to get windows asking for a username and password when trying to access one of the home directorys
4. How to create a quest account that needs no password, or better: how to configure a NFS share that do not needs a password and such windows should not ask for one?

edit: new problem after restart:
like described accessing NFS with windows tutorial i selected that it should reconnect automaticly after restart. Now after a restart when i try to click on the, still listed, network drive i get a message like : "wrong syntax for direcotory name or file name " (the actual message is not in english) so i cannot access the drive anymore, and i cannot delete it too! but i can create another drive to the exaclty same directory on the NAS and "see" the files again. I did this 5 times now, i have 4 inaccessable network dives now listed in the explorer which i cannot delete. What should i do now?

 

[camilo suarez]

i guess you have to use CIFS while your clients are using windows and then make another share using NFS when they switch to linux. i dont think windows 7 will see a NFS share.

 

[camilo suarez]

doing a quick google search i found this..

http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/nfs-share-on-windows-kick-the-cifs-habit.15796/

 

[senior_hombre]

Thats exactly the tutorial i used, my problem is more on the details. and btw: Windows 7 sees NFS shares, and it should work without problems.
btw: I need NFS especially because o want both Windows and Linux clients to access the directory.
All of the documentations say that using NFS is the best way to achieve that. But the strange part is, that every interesting post in this forum which starts with a similar problem like mine, quickly got hijacked by someone suggesting to use CIFS, or died without any answers.

When taking into account that the documentation is very superfically on this subject and no qualfied answer seem to be found on this forum, i am starting to think, that there is maybe noone around realy knowing how to use NFS .
Is it possbible that NFS is not even fully working?
I am searching for an answer for hours (and need to go to bed now) and recently found a (no very informative) video (2 weeks old) on which the maker said in a subordinate clause that FreeNAS does not support password authentification for NFS, is this true?

 

[cyberjock]

Yeah, except NFS performance on Windows ranges from "ok" to "just plain crappy". I couldn't even get 15MB/sec on NFS while I was easily doing 350MB/sec with CIFS. Didn't take a degree in computer science to figure out which one I wanted to use on my desktop. ;)

 

[senior_hombre]

At least you had a chance to test it out, i did not. In my case i want to use two datasets to work as linux network home directorys, so i need all of the stuff CIFS do not provides like the unix persission system. But i do not want it linux exclusive because it has to work in a dual boot (linux/windows 7) scenario. But i already said that, now i just want to get it to work.

I just found out, that creating the network drive on windows 7 makes a difference if i put "\\" right in front of the path:
\\192.168.0.17:/mnt/volume1/user1
at least asks me for login (but it did not work either, i think its because i am still in the domain of my windows 7 computer, at least the login windows is implying that), but this is not documented in the documentation or tutorial too.
So i am thinking that one of the reasons it did not work it that it did not try to login at the first place (i did not get a login prompt) and just uses the windows 7 user.

Anyway, i just want to clarify that iam still looking for a solution, or at least some information where i can get help for my problem, i need to solve this.

 

[cyberjock]

Umm. I'm confused. I do dual boot Windows 7 and Linux Mint and I do CIFS on both (I have also done NFS on both as well as NFS on just linux in the past for various other things).

The harsh reality is that if you will be doing Windows you are virtually forced to use CIFS. And since you shouldn't share the same files with more than one protocol you are also, by definition, locked into CIFS exclusively.

I won't lie, CIFS works sufficiently fast enough that it's kind of a mute point to argue for NFS instead of CIFS. If you have the kind of user-base where NFS' low CPU overheard matters you can also probably afford to buy a CPU that can better handle CIFS anyway. Even the FreeNAS Mini, which has an Atom processor, did almost 400MB/sec when I put a 10Gb NIC in it and did throughput tests!