CIFS Share Setup: Why is This Causing Me No Problems At All?

[ewhac]

Hwaet! About a year ago when I first setup FreeNAS, I brought my UNIX-centric, virulent anti-Microsoft attitude to the FreeNAS Web interface and proceeded to create pools and filesystems that catered to the needs of UNIX/Linux (mode bits as opposed to ACLs, etc.). Then I opened up the CIFS setup panel and told it to expect UNIX mode bits, no directory server (local user), and to expose user home directories as shares to logged-in users, but not to guests.

As a consequence of this, my experiences with CIFS on my various client machines has been.... absolutely fine. Windows sees the files; can read, write, create, and delete files; and the very same files are visible from Linux clients. At no point did I have to configure anything from the Windows side and, IMHO, that's exactly how it should be. About the only complaint I might have is that it sometimes takes a couple of login attempts before Windows sees the share.

All the other threads I've read about problems with CIFS suggest that most people set them up wrong, that pools/filesystems were created the wrong way, that ACLs must be enabled, that I clearly haven't read a single page of the Samba docs, that CIFS options have to be just so, etc. etc.

So why does my setup seem to work exactly the way I want (so far)?

 

[anodos]

Samba is designed to work across all Unix-type operating systems. Not every such OS has nfsv4 acls. Ergo samba will work without using nfsv4 acls. Every way of configuring samba has its warts. You mentioned an example of such a wart in your post.

Do you ever configure your Unix server via putty from a windows client? How about configuring FreeNAS via the webgui accessed from a windows client? Are those acceptable ways of administering a Unix server? I fail to see a relevant difference between using a internet explorer to access a webgui to administer a server and using windows explorer to access samba to administer a server.

Then again, I'm mostly a pragmatic person. ACLs work if you know what you're doing, and I believe are currently the best way of handling permissions in samba. Unless you manage to carve a very specific niche for yourself, you need to understand and be willing to work with all operating systems because in the real world you use whatever tools you have / whatever tools work best. :)

 

[cyberjock]

I'm not sure ewhac, but I'd like to talk to you about your system. I've been considering CIFS and UNIX mode but I have little experience with it personally. Can we talk about your system in PM? I have questions about how you do that and how it works for you.

 

[ewhac]

Certainly.

 

[ewhac]

I fail to see a relevant difference between using a internet explorer to access a webgui to administer a server and using windows explorer to access samba to administer a server.

I don't think your analogy holds. I can replace IE with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or even Lynx if the Web page author did their job right. (And who the hell still uses IE?) Whereas requiring the use of Windows to configure Samba implies that Windows and only Windows knows the necessary magic to make the share work properly, which kind of negates the whole point of Samba, which is to make Windows irrelevant to your IT planning and maintenance.

Then again, I'm mostly a pragmatic person. ACLs work if you know what you're doing, and I believe are currently the best way of handling permissions in samba.

I've been working with UNIX mode bits since 1982, so they're deeply ingrained, and have managed to handle all my use cases. I haven't put nearly the same amount of work into ACLs. I probably should, since ACL support is nearly everywhere now, and some man pages have hinted that UNIX mode bits are now implemented via ACLs under the hood.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I use CIFS with Posix permissions but I also ignore how they work because I have a simple config and if it breaks i can easily fix it. If you change permissions using windows then you get acls on that file/dir so i tend to not do that. I tend to make permission changes on Freenas directly.

 

[ewhac]

So...

I just built a new desktop rig for myself, and installed Windows 7 (because games). I was a little concerned, however, that I would finally have to learn and understand the braindamage behind Windows ACLs before I could access the CIFS shares on my FreeNAS server. And so, with no small amount of apprehension, I opened the network neighborhood browser, navigated to my user folder on the FreeNAS server and...

It worked.

I mean, it worked better than it did on WinXP. It just came right up. All the files were there, including the large archive of installers for Windows utilities and games... Which launched and ran directly from the NAS. I was also able to copy new files in to the NAS without the slightest argument, and copy speeds are regularly in the range of 95MB/sec. I have not tried any obscure Windows-style permission management and, frankly, I don't care if that arcana doesn't work, because that's not the intended use case.

I might be insufferably smug about this if I understood why this was working so well.

Config files available upon request.