Nas4Free Samba Home Directories Active Directory

Wow that title is a mouthful. So I installed Nas4free (9.1.0.1-636) on a server with ample storage and wanted to give my end users access to this storage. Why Nas4free? Because it’s freakin easy to administer, fast, and ZFS snapshots are pretty damn nice. And free.

So, nas4free on a server. I also had active directory with about 120 windows users. Hell if I’m going to setup 120 “local” users on nas4free AND have to manage 120 “local” users passwords when they forget. No way. So I could either use LDAP or Active Directory – in my case I chose AD.

Under Access, choose Active Directory (This actually joins the server to your domain, so I assume your network and other settings are already correct)
Domain Controller name: MYDC1
domain name (DNS): MYDOMAIN.LOCAL
Domain name (NetBIOS): MYDOMAIN
Administrator name: ADMINISTRATOR
Administration password: ******

Save. Then verify that it joined your domain by clicking on Diagnostics, then Information. Click on MS Domain.
You should see the line “Join to ‘MYDOMAIN’ is OK” and “checking the trust secret for domain MYDOMAIN via RPC calls succeeded” as well as a list of all of your domain user accounts imported.

But then I needed to change CIFS/SMB to allow my users:
Click on Services then CIFS/SMB
Authentication should already be set to Active Directory. I had issues with protocol, so I changed it to NT1. I also changed the workgroup to be the netBIOS name from above.

Then, on shares, I created a HOmeDirs with the following path
/mnt/zfs/zfsdataset/homedirs/%U
Made it browseable and with Guest Access enabled
Then enabled Shadow Copy
In AUX parameters I entered:
valid users = %U
force user = %U

Then, all you have to do manually is create each directory:
SSH to your nas4free
mkdir /mnt/zfs/zfsdataset/homedirs/USERNAME1 etc

I ended up chmod -R 777 /mnt/zfs/zfsdataset/homedirs

3 thoughts on “Nas4Free Samba Home Directories Active Directory”

  1. hello,

    i have a question regarding the way that nas4free works. i was looking for a way to have a file server machine in a windows ad domain to serve around 100 users but to rely on a linux box not a windows one.
    is is possible to have the shares available for the users of ad without mounting the share on ad dc? i was trying to have a network setup like this:
    – a cluster with 2 nodes hosting several virtual machines (2 dc in HA and few other internal services-built on proxmox)
    – one file server to host the files for the entire network.
    so, i was interested to allow the users to access their files even when i restart the dc’s(updates or anything else).

  2. Definitely possible – but from the questions you posed, I’m guessing you’re not a Systems Admin/Sys Engineer etc. You may have bit off more than you can chew if you’re asking about rebooting the DCs and want to know if the shares will maintain. I’d suggest paying someone to set it up for you.

  3. your answer is not helping me much.
    i work for a small company that doesnt want to invest much money in it dept. i want to get rid of an old multihomed server (dc,dns,file server) that took around 15 minutes to restart. for that to happens i need to spend alot of time afterwork to have it always updated. there were some situations when it didn’t start at all. i do not know why. and for that i have to watch the all process to be sure that it will start again, and cannot rely on auto restart script.
    so, maybe i’m not a sys admin as good as you are, but i would have appreciated much a helpful answer.
    thanks anyway.
    dont bather to answer next. keep up with the good work

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