Freenas 9.10 config issues

[gary201]

First off, I'm new to freenas. I have two qnap devices that I've used for years, and they work well, but I'm interested in switching to freenas for the zfs benefits. However, in my prototype testing I'm doing on an installation running on ESXi, I've found a couple things I just can't get past. Surly these things can't be that difficult.

The first is dealing with home directories. On my qnap, I just create a share, flag it for use as home directories and since the qnap device is a member of AD, there's nothing else to configure. Any AD user with the profile set to "\\qnapdevice\home" will end up with a directory "home/DOMAIN=<DOMAIN>/<domainuser>. It just works. If the user logging in is using a local qnap account, then its just the same path minus the "DOMAIN=<DOMAIN>" part.

I've spent two days on this and just can't get it to work. the freenas is a member of the domain, I know that's working right. I can create a share and map to it correctly if i manually set the permissions from an ssh session. I've got the share created for "home" that points to /mnt/zpool/homes, so it "should" be automatically creating the directory /mnt/zpool/homes/<domain>/<user>". This is the entry in smb4.conf that I'm referencing: path = /mnt/zpool/homes/%D/%U

I've tried to pre-create the directories and even setting the permissions explicitly and still can't get past "system error 53...the network path was not found". It should just be as simple as "net use <drive> \\<nas-device>\home" for a user logged into a windows system with an AD account.

The other thing seems to be how freenas deals with the recycle bin. On the qnap devices, I just set the time interval that objects should be removed (e.g. 7 days), and it will automatically purge out content older than that setting once/day. Evidently there is no ability in Freenas to do this unless you go create your own script and schedule it. It would be great if this was simply covered automatically by Freenas rather than requiring scripting/scheduling.

One other thing I've noticed is that with qnap, the recycle bin (@Recycle) is always visible. It's not a hidden directory. On Freenas, it's ".recycle", so you have the option of not displaying it by default (so users would have to know that it exists), or don't hide hidden objects and then all of those default files with a user are listed. It'd be nice if just the recycle bin wasn't a hidden object.

Anyone have this home directory thing worked out for 9.10 and a solution for the recycle bin cleanup?

 

[gary201]

Okay, some success has been discovered. There's a bit of a conceptual difference for anyone moving from a Qnap NAS to Freenas for "home" directory setups. For Qnap, you simply mark a share for "home" use. You also do not need to create any directories or set permissions. An AD user can then just "net use x: \\server\home" and qnap will automatically create the directory under the "home" directory location. The user also doesn't need to provide their username on the "net use" command as qnap will automatically determine that based on the credentials being passed.

Freenas on the other hand doesn't do a lot of this. You need to manually create the directory location /mnt/dataset/home/<DOMAIN_NAME>/<username> and set the permissions on the directory. Samba on freenas won't do this. Additionally, samba on Freenas won't automatically determine the user by the credentials passed and you must explicitly indicate the user name, so in my case "net use \\server\gary", which depends on the directory haveing been previously created "/mnt/dataset/home/<DOMAIN>/gary along with the permissions.

This is neither good or bad, just a different way of approaching this, albeit more "manual" than with a Qnap device.

As for the recycle bin, this post (https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/empty-recycle-bin.7850/) seems to provide a good solution, but it's a shame that this couldn't just be part of the Freenas GUI and has to be done manually.