CIFS/SMB Permissions/Configurations For Mac OS X Users

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dkusek

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Mar 16, 2016
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Hello All,

This may be simple but wanted to check for best practices or what other have seen to be the most acceptable in the field. When creating an SMB share that is going to be shared out to mixed environments, both Mac and Windows clients, what permission scheme should be used? Mac, Unix, Windows? Also, does case sensitivity play a role in this?

As a side note, we also push clients that are all Mac users to go with SMB shares as Apple is SLOWLY integrating that into their wheelhouse. We are currently using 9.3.

I have deliberately kept our system specs out of the mix because this question should not have any bearing on that. I will say though that we use 32GB on up to 256GB of RAM for all systems and use enterprise SAS drives. I follow these forums closely and enjoy the input from the community and look forward to contributing where I can.

Thank you,
Devin
 

anodos

Sambassador
iXsystems
Joined
Mar 6, 2014
Messages
9,543
Hello All,

This may be simple but wanted to check for best practices or what other have seen to be the most acceptable in the field. When creating an SMB share that is going to be shared out to mixed environments, both Mac and Windows clients, what permission scheme should be used? Mac, Unix, Windows? Also, does case sensitivity play a role in this?

As a side note, we also push clients that are all Mac users to go with SMB shares as Apple is SLOWLY integrating that into their wheelhouse. We are currently using 9.3.

I have deliberately kept our system specs out of the mix because this question should not have any bearing on that. I will say though that we use 32GB on up to 256GB of RAM for all systems and use enterprise SAS drives. I follow these forums closely and enjoy the input from the community and look forward to contributing where I can.

Thank you,
Devin

It's probably a good idea to upgrade to 9.10 if you have Mac clients. This will allow you to leverage major samba improvements for OSX support. To do this you need to enable the following VFS objects in ALL of your shares (after upgrading to 9.10):
  • fruit
  • catia
  • streams_xattr
Permissions type should be "windows". Setting dataset type to "case insensitive" and adding the auxiliary parameter "case sensitive = yes" has been reported to improve samba performance in datasets containing extremely large numbers of files, but I'm unsure of how this will interact with "fruit" and "catia". My gut reaction is that it's probably best to not change dataset case sensitivity and use the above VFS objects.

As always, test before deploying.
 
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dkusek

Explorer
Joined
Mar 16, 2016
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78
Thank you! Once I get a chance to get up to 9.10, I will do so and apply this process and take note of stability and performance. THANK YOU
 
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