SOLVED Hi, genBTC here. Windows Samba issue and iSCSI+NTFS local mounting issue

[genBTC]

Hey guys, its genBTC here. I'm 32 and a lifelong PC nerd and I am very excited about finally being able to use FreeNAS.
About last week I was at the recycling center, and I found a thrown away old server, that turned out to be still good.
The specs are in my signature. Along with the rest of my stuff. I barely managed to fit everything :p (I'll figure out how I want to format it later) {formatted it}

Great software package really, super powerful. My one complaint so far is that I feel like by joining FreeNAS so soon into release 11, I'm kind of at a disadvantage, because most of the manuals written are for 9. The forums are a great resource though so I'll just have to rely on you guys.
Also, im of the opinion that the current GUI is lacking but the new one is a step backward.
The first thing is when I was setting up passwordless SSH, I was stopped by permissions, and finally got it working after a buncha chmod work. So confusing.
I have some stuff that I want to have some advice on.
1st question: How do i get my primary user to be able to log into the Web GUI ? right now its only allowing Root. he can log into SSH (or could before i went passwordless)
Do i have to add the "Staff" group to his user? I bet its one of those.
EDIT: now that i think about it, i probably misunderstand groups entirely, and thats why the permissions got messed up. Any good resources on understanding specifically the Freenas group permission system?

2nd question, I have a horrible variance in connection speed over Samba, since I have a mixed OS/NIC setup. Everythings a mishmash and each performs like its individual little snowflake, but oddly, only 1 machine on the network: the worst one, ( "SadComputer #3" in signature ) can hit 100MB/s+ over Samba. My best Windows 10 computer (#1) only gets 35MB/s. It has a Marvell 8167, which is not a Realtek and the thing is, the card gets 82MB/s over FTP and 78MB/s over iSCSI (on a NTFS FS). Which Both sound right to me. The Linux Box #2 hits 60MB/s. The Freenas box can greatly exceed Gigabit thats for sure (I checked), in fact I'm thinking of switching to 10GbE, to overcome the bad link to my main PC #1. I will continue to look into it. What I need to know is how do i Diagnose Samba connection issues, where are the applicable log files, and how do I bring them up?
EDIT: Fixed Samba, see below.

Current Situation: I have a "zVol" containing an extent of an iSCSI block device running NTFS filesystem, on Pool #2. I need to move them OUT of the NTFS container. Therefore i would like to mount the Zvol/NTFS locally and mv the files to regular ZFS dataset. I basically need to learn more about zvols and datasets, i think, so i will continue to do that.

Anyway i just wanted to get the communication lines open and say Hi and that I will probably be having some more questions and will be posting some more in the other section.

Thanks and hope to meet some of you soon.
-Abei

 

[gpsguy]

Welcome to the forums!

FreeNAS 11 was the successor to FreeNAS 9.10, so if you find something written for the latter, it'll probably work in 11.

If you'd like a PDF and/or ePub version of the docs, you can download one via a link in my signature.

You can't - root is the only allowable account for accessing the webGUI.

How do i get my primary user to be able to log into the Web GUI ? right now its only allowing Root

 

[genBTC]

OK, so using root to log in isn't some kind of blasphemy ? What if i wanted to log in remotely? seems counter intuitive to what i've learned.

Oh wow, the new 11.U2 manual is top notch. Thanks. I wasnt on the right manual at all before.

Right now im dealing with trying to locally mount an NTFS filesystem that I created on an iSCSI share, that was set up with a ZVol as the Extent. For some reason, i was reading that its impossible in Freenas 11 to mount the thing locally.

crw-r----- 1 root operator 0x92 Aug 12 10:25 Seagate15Zvol

root@freenas:/dev/zvol/Seagate1500 # mdconfig -a -f Seagate15Zvol
mdconfig: /dev/zvol/Seagate1500/Seagate15Zvol is not a regular file

root@freenas:/dev/zvol/Seagate1500 # mkdir /mnt/tmp
root@freenas:/dev/zvol/Seagate1500 # mount -t ntfs Seagate15Zvol /mnt/tmp
mount: Seagate15Zvol: Operation not supported by device

Is there no way to mount it locally so I can copy some files off it at high speed ?
Im trying to get whatevers in the NTFS container in the Zvol onto another Zvol. As a last resort I could remake a 2nd ZVol->NTFS on the target, but that isnt a magic bullet and im trying not to do that. I dont need the NTFS behavior on it. And file copying over the network is like 20MB/s abysmal and its over 1 TB of files.

This is gonna be one of those hard things i bet. (like fixing Samba which might solve this event too if i could actually copy things fast)

I noticed that when i did:
dd if=Seagate15Zvol of=/mnt/tmp/thing.img count=65536 bs=1
That worked, it could read, and it has the right RAW data in the header of the Zvol. What gives? Theres got to be a way.
Im just going to give up on mounting it. and do :
dd if=/dev/zvol/Seagate1500/Seagate15Zvol bs=524288 of=/mnt/RaidZ-3x2TB/seagate.img
Will that work? Alternately just "cp" the zvol file from one pool to another? Will both work?

 

[genBTC]

On my list of things to do:
Replicate this ZFS Vol extent from iscsi NTFS into another ZFS pool, (and re-Serve it over iSCSI) or Figure out how to mount it locally(re: above)
Need to learn ZFS Commands to do this.
Analyze my network and figure out how to Set up Samba so it works faster.
Learn why we boot off USB sticks and how to prevent them from going bad/dying, back them up, restore. Seems like a weak point of the whole system, if the OS is on a horrible consumer USB drive.
Read a whole ton of stuff on the forum.

 

[joeschmuck]

I would recommend posting a new thread in the appropriate section of the forums vice the Introductions section, you are apt to get more help.

And welcome to the forums!

 

[genBTC]

Yep thanks will do. Just forums are kind of daunting figured i'll struggle in my own little thread for a while :p
Get all my ducks in a row best I can first. Whoever stumbles onto this is welcome to help for now.

 

[genBTC]

I figured out why my best machine was getting the worst Samba speeds, by doing:
smbstatus -l
I found out that it's trying to use AES-128-CBC encyrption to that machine, but neither CPU supports native AES :(
And the other computers are not trying to use it, therefore its normal speed.
Any way I can disable this on the server side? For the time being until i get an AES CPU. I dont know how to dabble with those settings on my Windows PC workstation.

 

[gpsguy]

Since joeschmuck is a modeerator, maybe he can move these messages out of the introduction section, so you'll have a wider audience.

 

[joeschmuck]

Done

 

[genBTC]

I fixed my Samba issue where speeds were capped to 35MB/s on any of the the SMB3 protocols (and worse on SMB2).
Now its at 80MB/s, like it should be. Thats near max for me.

Heres what I had to set to fix the speed.
This is the final settings that fixed it for me (it was a client side issue all along - in Windows 10) :
(yes i had mucked with these before to "secure my system"...)

Go into Group Policy (gpedit.msc) :
Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > Security Options.
Disable Digitally sign communications (it even says in the properties of that item that it can impose a 15% speed penalty).
Disable REQUIRE 128 bit encryption on the "client" portion of that other thing. (i cut off the description in the pic - where it says "c..." should say "client".)

Unrelatedly to that, I also managed to successfully "dd" over my iScsi ZVol extent from one pool to another (i'm assuming cp woulda worked too) and remounted it over iSCSI successfully.

So far so good :)

Now to learn about ISCSI, Zvols and whatnot. and how to migrate between them.

 

[joeschmuck]

Hey, some of the picture is fuzzy :p

Glad you fixed it.

 

[genBTC]

Thanks!
Also!
I got my iScsi ZVol extent w/ NTFS FS to mount locally (not over iscsi) after much work.
First i had to take an image of it with dd:
dd if=/dev/zvol/Seagate1500/Seagate15Zvol bs=524288 of=/mnt/RaidZ-3x2TB/diskimage.img (the 524288 is just to make it go faster.)

I was unable to use either mdconfig or mount on this "/dev/zvol/Seagate1500/Seagate15Zvol" thing thats neither a file nor a device, only stuff like dd,cat,head will work. Wish i knew why.
Anyway, once you have the disk image (duplicated once) you can ?easily? mount it.:

Code:

mkdir /mnt/tmp
mdconfig -u md1 -f diskimage.img
gnop create -o 1024k md1
kldload fuse
mount_ntfs -o ro /dev/md1.nop /mnt/tmp/

The key was using gnop to set the disk offset to the start of the NTFS partition, because the disk *.img that I took with 'dd' was of the actual whole drive, not the resultant NTFS partition. Therefore with -o at a default 1024k (aka sector 2048, or 1048576 bytes) which is usually where Windows 10 creates NTFS filesystems on MBR disks (was for me), it finds it. If not, you will have to find your partition offset manually, using some disk software.
Then you can mount it read only and copy the files off locally into a normal location.
I did all this to transfer all the NTFS FS files locally to a ZFS Pool because of speed. Turned out the NTFS and iSCSI was not helping speed.
Unfortunately this method requires 2x of space for the 'dd' image so I would wonder if theres a better way to mount /dev/zvol/Seagate1500/Seagate15Zvol directly. It was fast tho.