Hi Folks. Sometimes the obvious escapes me. In the documentation for Account Configuration you say "Create one guest account that all users will use". Yet, those are the only instructions on how to set-up the guest account.
When I go to Add New User I don't see any alternative to setting up specific user names.
How do I set-up the guest account for anyone to access? This is on a small home network and we don't need to set-up specific users for our shared files.
I found the information in the CIFs documentation.
Most operating systems have a concept of owning users, owning groups, and everyone else. This is the way that OSX and Unix (FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, SysV, etc) work by default. It gets a bit trickier with things like ACLs on OSX, Unix, and Windows where you can assign more fine grained permissions, like "Do I have the ability to create files?", "Do I have the ability to reassign owners?", etc for users and groups.
Ok, moving on...
In your particular case, since you are assuming absolute trust in the home network, you should setup guest sharing on the nas box using a single account (example: myfamily, roomies, etc). If you take this route, you should make the single guest user (myfamily, roomies) and make them own the volume/dataset and set the permission to read/write/execute for the user/group fields.
Once you do that, you assign the guest account (myfamily, roomies) to the guest account for the share. Turn on CIFS. Done! The entire process should take less than 30 minutes from start to finish (if you have trouble, please feel free to poke around on IRC as well).
Alternatively, a more traditional Unix setup would be to create 3 individual users and assign them all to the same group. That way Andre, "Bob", and "Suzy" can all login to the NAS at the same time with separate home directories, have their own sandboxes to play around with, and -- for example -- in the event that "Bob" has a lot of friends come over who are less trusted and he shares the WiFi password with them, at least you can ensure that someone doesn't delete all your Lady Gaga albums you bought off iTunes because they didn't like them, or take your legally obtained CD ISOs and spread them all over the Internet via Bittorrent, Usenet, etc (*). This is more complicated because it would require actual authentication -- which really isn't all that hard: it takes ~10 minutes more time to setup, depending on whether or not everyone uses the same password on their OSX/Windows boxes as they do on the NAS.
(*) In reality there's nothing preventing anyone with root access from physically accessing the box and dumping all the data off of it, and FreeNAS by default has a very permissive console. That being said, it's still possible to hack into the console quite easily if you understand how FreeBSD works and peek at the files as well. Setting up separate users just makes things harder if they don't have physical access to the box and help keeps things sane. Furthermore, removing a hard drive from a chassis and putting it into another PC and reading the contents off of it isn't hard because the contents aren't encrypted.
