It should not be this hard - cannot SMB share

[James Willey]

FreeNAS-11.2-U7 - I am a newbie at Freenas but a very old dude with computers. My built machine has new motherboard and AMD - with 32GB RAM.

Have made couple of dozen fresh installs over the past several days. As a side benefit I am getting really good at the install process.

Bought from Amazon book "Building a FreeNas Home Server" - but windows using CIFS in his book. Tried to follow the same general setup for SMB. I also need to see the server in Ubuntu 19.10 and have tired various directions on setting that up - heck I might settle for only one or the two working. Prior to the book purchase read the manual - surfed this forum. Google and found some directions. Setting up the volume and dataset - each of the "directions" I have found have small differences as related to users and permissions - nothing I found seems to be specific to 11.2. Apparently SMB new to 11.x ? as most windows directions talk about CIFS.

Most of the time cannot even see the volume/dataset on either Win or Ubuntu machines - with various combinations of NFS and/or SMB. On those combinations where I can see I am not able to copy a file over to the freenas - permissions error most of the time or I cannot even make the connection (shared drive or mount).

Can anyone point me to a CURRENT set of directions - all I want is a simple file sharing server. If not - any suggestions on another product that does not take this much research and effort to install.

 

[garm]

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[anodos]

Try out 11.3 RC1. It has an ACL manager that makes permissions issues much easier to diagnose and resolve.

 

[KrisBee]

@James Willey If it's Cameron Bishop's book you have, then it's rather dated - 2015. According to FreeNAS docs version 9.3 was the last to refer to Windows share as "CIFS" shares ( see:https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/9.3/freenas_sharing.html#windows-cifs-shares), from version9.10 it's been called Windows (SMB) shares.

As windows file sharing has always been provided by the inbuilt SAMBA service in FreeNAS, you can think of SMB and CIFS as the same thing. (People use the term interchangeably, although strictly there is a difference in meaning which you can google.)

In Ubuntu and other linux distros you are likely to come across both the terms "cifs" and "smb" when trying to access windows shares. When mounting a remote share at the CLI the syntax will refer to the type "cifs", e.g. mount -t cifs ... When using a desktop file manger you might need to give the location in the form: "smb://<ip of sever>" .

I don't believe you need to resort to 11.3 RC1 to do what you want if you only have a basic share requirement between PC and FreeNAS server. Is this just a home network with a single or low number of active users?

 

[James Willey]

Watched the video - for some reason sound was very low on my system.

Win 10 system did not see the freenas network. I was not able to map a network drive to freenas until I first setup a network location - not seen that behavior before. Could copy files. The Ubuntu machine another story. Could not mount or see the window share and adding a NFS share did nothing.

Installed 11.3 RC1 with no issues. After reboot of freenas Win 10 and Ubuntu both saw the share. But neither could do anything.

I do have a simple home network with a single user - have 4 machines that I run as Win 10 or Ubuntu for machine learning. So same user - several machines. I am doing Kaggle challenges and go with Win or Ubuntu dependent on the type of problem being worked - most often all four machines using the same data - hence the desire for home server. Have used dropbox with success but it's really mostly a pain and slow and useless. Starting a competition this weekend with lots of images - data will quickly get to 1TB which is too slow to try and share between machines on dropbox. At this very early stage is looks like I want to do the work (Deepfake) on the Ubuntu machines, so success with that share a bit more important.

Going back to 11.2 - 11.3 seems fine but a blind man wandering thru it's dialogs probably a bad idea. At least with 11.2 there's some available guidance.

It was Bishop's book - he sure made it seem easy - hence the title of my post.

So still need help. Will update later tonight with results of my re-install/re-try/

 

[James Willey]

Seem to have SMB setup so both Win and Ubuntu are seeing it. Coping some huge files there now. Hopefully with success.

Thanks for the hep