How to make macOS and Windows play nice together with FreeNAS

[DCswitch]

After much testing there's no doubt that SMB is the best protocol for both Apple macOS and Windows (forget AFP unless you're setting up Time Machine). NFS was too slow, but if it's stable between both Windows and Apple machines I'm open to it. Since SMB is Microsoft Windows baby - my question is when I create a dataset should I choose a share type of Unix or Windows? Because macOS machines are going to be connecting to it as well- I was leaning towards UNIX, but since SMB is Windows baby perhaps Windows is the best share type?

 

[rungekutta]

In my experience, SMB with Windows permissions works best in that scenario.

NFS works very well with Linux hosts and ESXi, probably MacOS too but I haven’t tested that much.

 

[DCswitch]

@rungekutta Okay that's for Permissions, but what should the Share Type under Options be- Windows or Unix? I have seen some people use Unix and some people use Windows, so I have no idea.

 

[anodos]

@rungekutta Okay that's for Permissions, but what should the Share Type under Options be- Windows or Unix? I have seen some people use Unix and some people use Windows, so I have no idea.

The label is not very helpful. Windows == SMB. Unix == Everything not SMB.

 

[DCswitch]

@anodos Thank you.

 

[seanm]

After much testing there's no doubt that SMB is the best protocol for both Apple macOS and Windows (forget AFP unless you're setting up Time Machine). NFS was too slow, but if it's stable between both Windows and Apple machines I'm open to it.

Don't use AFP for Time Machine either, FreeNAS has supported Time Machine over SMB for a while now.

Also, don't bother with NFS on macOS, macOS only supports an old version of NFS.

@anodos is there a ticket in Jira to rename "Windows" to "SMB" in the web UI?

 

[anodos]

Don't use AFP for Time Machine either, FreeNAS has supported Time Machine over SMB for a while now.

Also, don't bother with NFS on macOS, macOS only supports an old version of NFS.

@anodos is there a ticket in Jira to rename "Windows" to "SMB" in the web UI?

No. In 11.3 the share types are mostly going away. There's a dropdown for something like that during dataset creation that applies some create-time optimizations depending on how the dataset will be used currently the "share types" are "Generic" and "SMB". The latter sets the ACL Mode to "restricted" and the case sensitivity to "insensitive" (this is subject to change during beta testing).

 

[joltman]

Well what about including LINUX NFS as well? I've got Windows/MacOS and Ubuntu living in my network. Should I still choose WINDOWS in that case? Or should I move to SMB for all my LINUX NFS Clients?

 

[anodos]

Well what about including LINUX NFS as well? I've got Windows/MacOS and Ubuntu living in my network. Should I still choose WINDOWS in that case? Or should I move to SMB for all my LINUX NFS Clients?

If you are exclusively using SMB on the share, choose windows, otherwise choose unix. In 11.3, these things will basically be re-labelled "SMB" and "Generic" and they will be create-time optimizations.