Users and groups not showing up in Windows 7

[Wallybanger]

Hi,

Just an update, i have tried this from a Windows 10 client and it works every time! Not exactly sure whats going on with my Windows 7 client?

I noticed when logging in when mapping the drive on the windows 10 machine that the domain name is blank.. not sure if this is why its working? I tried to do this on the Windows 7 machine with "\User1" as the log in but didn't have any luck...

Thanks for the update. That's good to know that it worked on Win10. I don't have any win10 machines here to test with. I've started a bug ticket for this issue... hopefully it'll get resolved.

 

[Mirfster]

Thanks for the update. That's good to know that it worked on Win10. I don't have any win10 machines here to test with. I've started a bug ticket for this issue... hopefully it'll get resolved.

TBH, I don't think the Devs will do too much. The issue appears to be outside of FreeNAS (on the Win 7 boxes) and thus more of a Workstation issue.

While I am not sure exactly what it is that is causing this, it will take more diagnosing on the Win 7 Machines to narrow it down.

 

[Simon FreeNAS]

Where do we head from here though? It is just so annoying that the Windows 7 Machine is prompting for a PW yet Windows 10 is all good.

If i used a windows 10 machine to change all the permissions first, would my windows 7 users be able to use/view the folders that they have permission too as per normal?

Although this is not the ideal solution what i am getting at would be having a dedicated windows 10 VM just used to change permissions until this issue is resolved.

 

[Wallybanger]

I installed Win7 in a virtual machine and the fresh install of Win7 allowed me to change permissions. Perhaps we're both just overdue for a re & re. In any case, lack of support for windows networking issues is as old as the operating system it's self. Even back on XP I remember irritating networking issues that no one could diagnose.

 

[Spearfoot]

I installed Win7 in a virtual machine and the fresh install of Win7 allowed me to change permissions. Perhaps we're both just overdue for a re & re. In any case, lack of support for windows networking issues is as old as the operating system it's self. Even back on XP I remember irritating networking issues that no one could diagnose.

Yes! Which is why @Mirfster and @m0nkey_ and some of the rest of us are so baffled when users are unable to do stuff that 'Just Works' for us... It's inconsistent, intermittent, and extremely hard to toubleshoot. Which, come to think of it, describes Windows networking in a nutshell!

 

[Simon FreeNAS]

My Win7 was a pretty fresh install :( but it is working on Win10 with no issues. Any other suggestions on what we can do to the Win7 machine? Any thing we can flush out?

 

[Simon FreeNAS]

Hi Guys,

Any other suggestions on this?

Am I able to use the Win10 machine to change all there permissions as per needed and then just let the Win7 Machines connect to the NAS as normal? So essentially this will work normally, i will just need to use a Win10 VM to change the permissions as i need them?

 

[anodos]

Hi Guys,

Any other suggestions on this?

Am I able to use the Win10 machine to change all there permissions as per needed and then just let the Win7 Machines connect to the NAS as normal? So essentially this will work normally, i will just need to use a Win10 VM to change the permissions as i need them?

You can use any windows machine to change permissions. Permissions should be something that you only need to set once.

 

[Stupendous Man!]

I've been scouring the internet for help on this exact issue. I have two windows 7 ultimate machines and one works as expected, the other behaves as described in this thread.

i.e. when adding a user/group that is present on the remote machine a prompt for credentials appears. When correct credentials are Re-entered the result is it cannot find the user/group you are looking for.

I'm hoping to revive this thread a bit to see if anyone else has the obscure answer. I believe it's policy/config related since the machine that it does NOT work on is by no means a fresh install of win7.

My hopes is that someone has been able to discover the random setting that god knows what might have been changed by some random install on your computer.

I would like to say that I believe that it's entirely Client Side. I'm currently running 9.10.2-U2 and everything else seems fine.

 

[Cornholio]

I've been having similar problems (user/group lists not retrieved from the FreeNAS server) - described on this thread https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...smb-user-group-list-from-win-10-client.53682/

My experience seems to be that:

• I only get the problem when using standard user accounts. Using the Windows Administrator account (bad idea) allows the user/group lists to be retrieved from the FreeNAS.
  
• However, if I use a standard user account with identical username/password credentials on my workstation (Win10) and on the FreeNAS, then the user/group lists ARE retrieved fine.

Feedback on the thread above seems to suggest that identical username/password credentials should not be necessary.

I echo your thoughts - I'm sure this isn't a FreeNAS problem, but is due to finickity (and difficult to reproduce) Windows networking issues.

 

[Scentle5S]

Not a solution here, just another victim sharing his funny story.

I've been experiencing similar issues with my setup for as long as I can remember. I've tried many Windows clients over the time (both VMs and real workstations) and have updated FreeNAS multiple times starting from FreeNAS 9. My main issue is that although users and groups do show up, they are not "accurate" :

• I can still see a user that I have deleted months ago.
• I can see a group A that I just added
• I can't see a group B that I also just added.
• And so on and so on...

There doesn't seem to be any logic dictating what I see and what I don't.

Today I got fed up with this and decided to try everything from scratch. So I did the following :

1. Set up a brand new Windows 10 VM.
2. Create a brand new FreeNAS 11.2-BETA2 boot environment (by "Upgrading" and resetting to factory defaults since I couldn't figure out how to make a fresh install while keeping my old environments).
3. Create brand new users and groups.
4. Import my pool.
   
5. Create a brand new dataset.
   
6. Create a brand new share for that dataset.

So as you can see, everything is brand new, except for my pool (which I imported) and my boot device.

Then I mounted my share in my VM, looked at the users filled with hope, and the strangest thing happened : I couldn't see some of my new groups and users, but could see users from my previous setup (that I didn't recreate yet), both "human users" and "jail users" (e.g. : the plex user)... Obviously, none of them exist neither in FreeNAS nor in the VM.

So that leaves me with three possible explanations :

1. Since my config was briefly imported in this new boot environment, there could have been something that wasn't scrapped during the "reset to factory defaults" process (although I find this highly unlikely).
2. Since I used the same boot drive, with my old boot environment still lying there, there might be something here too (although I find this highly unlikely too).
   
3. Since I used the same pool, there might be something in there that causes this issue. Although all the explanations seem highly unlikely, this is the one that seems to make the most sense. But at the same time I hope that it's not the cause, because it would be ridiculous and extremely expensive and difficult to have to wipe a whole pool just to fix a stupid sharing issue...

Regarding explanation 1 and 2, I tried to install on a USB stick first, but ended up with errors at boot time. That's why I gave up and used my original boot drive (a SATA DOM). I guess I could try again with a different USB stick or even erase my SATA DOM, since I have backups of my config.
Regarding explanation 3, I guess I could try creating a new pool with an empty drive, if I can find one lying around that still work and isn't IDE...

I'll post the results of my next attempts, if I find the time and motivation to go on (right now I'm just smashing my head against the wall and it almost seems more productive than trying to solve this issue with actual reasoning).

 

[Scentle5S]

Well I think I found a trick for this, even though I still don't understand what's really going on. The trick is "simple" : as long as you can't see a user or a group in your Windows client, keep deleting and creating it under FreeNAS to increase its ID (UID or GID). The result is just as simple : if I couldn't see a group A with GID 977 for instance, I could see it (same name) with a GID 978.

 

[anodos]

Well I think I found a trick for this, even though I still don't understand what's really going on. The trick is "simple" : as long as you can't see a user or a group in your Windows client, keep deleting and creating it under FreeNAS to increase its ID (UID or GID). The result is just as simple : if I couldn't see a group A with GID 977 for instance, I could see it (same name) with a GID 978.

If for some reason users don't appear in the permissions editor, try entering pdbedit -Lv in the command line. If the users aren't in the passedb.tdb, then you need to re-import them.

Code:

rm /var/db/samba4/.usersimported
service ix-pre-samba start

 

[Scentle5S]

Of course now that it would be helpful to try your advice, I can't seem to reproduce the issue... But thanks for the tip : I'll remember to come here and try if/when it happens again.

 

[Evelen]

June 2019, still have the same exact problem. any solution yet?
Running last version of FreeNAS (11.2-STABLE)
Tested on both fully updated Windows 10 Pro and Windows Server 2016