Best share setup for Mac & Windows use?

[pcmofo]

Hey guys, I've been using FreeNAS for about 7 years now and I'm on my second build. Things have been running great accessing multiple shares from both Mac and PC via CIFS/SMB and AFP but I'm trying to simplify things in my setup.

So my question is, what is the best way to setup my shares so that everyone on the network can access shared Media on Windows and Mac (10.11) and specific Mac users can access private shares for their own backups?

I currently have a setup where I have a few AFP shares tied to specific users. When you connect to the network you automatically see the FreeNAS box and can connect to it like any other network share and only you can see your own backup share. I have a single large media share setup as a CIFS/SMB share with guest access enabled. This way all Mac and windows users can access it as well as Plex.

My current setup has a few issues however.
- Mac users have to manually connect to the main CIFS/SMB share using the Go->connect to server command. This is super annoying and would be awful if I had to do that for backups too as the backups might fail if the connection dropped before the backups started. Why isnt't there an easier way to connect like Windows-> map network drive ? Connecting on startup is pointless as I sleep my mac all the time and startup scripts wont always keep me connected.

- With the upgrade to el Capitan it's apparent Apple is moving away from AFP... I'd like to move away from it too. It has become extra flaky after the upgrade. I do love that I can always see the share as a network connected device though.

Thanks guys!

 

[pirateghost]

Create datasets for the Macs to use afp and time machine. Set quotas on these datasets and make the users own them.

For fileshares, use CIFS

 

[pcmofo]

Create datasets for the Macs to use afp and time machine. Set quotas on these datasets and make the users own them.

For fileshares, use CIFS

Yep, thats the exact setup i have now. I'm wondering if there is a easy way to switch to all cifs.

 

[DCswitch]

Yep, thats the exact setup i have now. I'm wondering if there is a easy way to switch to all cifs.

@pcmofo Did you you figure out the best way? I'm in the same boat. My main question now is whether to use UNIX or Windows as my dataset?

 

[anodos]

@pcmofo Did you you figure out the best way? I'm in the same boat. My main question now is whether to use UNIX or Windows as my dataset?

Windows == SMB

 

[seanm]

Create datasets for the Macs to use afp and time machine. Set quotas on these datasets and make the users own them.

Why do you recommend AFP? I wouldn't recommend it for anything anymore, unless you have really old macOS clients. Just use SMB for everything, including Time Machine.

 

[Jasse Jansson]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think AFP allows MacOS to spam the filesystem with "extended attributes" which is a mess for other OS's.
I don't have a Mac anymore but it was painful to clean the servers FS (lotsa xattr's if I remember correctly).
Pure SMB should be enough.

 

[anodos]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think AFP allows MacOS to spam the filesystem with "extended attributes" which is a mess for other OS's.
I don't have a Mac any more but it was painful to clean the servers FS (lotsa xattr's if I remember correctly).
Pure SMB should be enough.

There are ways to make it so that SMB clients can also read the xattrs written through netatalk (that's part of the reason for vfs_fruit). Windows clients will also write xattrs in some situations through vfs_streams_xattr.