Newbie networking questions - Windows and Linux access

[blueghost]

Hello everyone
This is my first post, and indeed my first go at any sort of networking. I am a TOTAL newbie to networking so I would just ask for people to be easy on me. I am not a lazy person looking for spoon feeding. I will read documentation, experiment etc so I am not afraid of putting the time in.

If anybody is able to point to documentation that helps me with my questions I will be very grateful and I will check it out. Any direct help or tips is also very much appreciated.

So I am dabbling with a little set up, 2 X 6TB drives that I have got going in a mirrored configuration. That is as far as I have gone because I want my steps from here to be correct. I have two questions.

1. I didn't encrypt these drives...is it possible to go back and make them encrypted once I have already made a pool of them? This is no big matter but I thought I'd ask.

2. I have both Windows and Linux pcs. From what I can see so far I have to, for example, make a dataset that will accommodate windows via sambashare. This looks straightforward. Can someone point me to where there are instructions as to how I hook my Linux pcs up in the same manner?

And last question...I had envisioned the server storage being a place where I could go with either a Linux pc or a Windows pc and store things in a common place that either pc could go back to to retrieve, work on etc. Do the two different operating systems store things on separate parts of the server and therefore, for example, the Linux pc could not access where the Windows pc had saved things? In my preliminary reading of the documentation that I am still getting my head around, did read that this was a bad idea and from reading it appears that what I am after isn't possible.

If I can get some help here with this either by pointing me to links or via comments I thank you in advance.

 

[Samuel Tai]

Currently, you can only encrypt your pool on creation. It's not possible to encrypt a pool afterwards; this may change in FreeNAS 12, when ZFS dataset encryption becomes available.

Assuming you're using Ubuntu, you can attach to a Samba share from Nautilus like so: https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/nautilus-connect.html.en. After entering the network URL smb://<FreeNAS IP>/<your share name>, you'll be prompted for a username and password.

Both Windows and Linux can attach to the same share and access the same directories and files. I do this myself without issues, and it's a convenient way to move files back and forth between platforms.

 

[sretalla]

this may change in FreeNAS 12

The current implementation in the nightlies looks like you will still need to assign a pool as encrypted at creation if you ever want any of the datasets within it to be encrypted. You can elect to have new datasets on that pool be encrypted at creation time or not, but it can't then be un-done (at least from the GUI).

You can probably encrypt an existing pool using some CLI work... I seem to remember there was something covering it... here it is: https://www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/how-to-encrypt-an-existing-raidz-or-mirror.16975/

I don't recommend doing any encryption before the release of TrueNAS Core 12 though.

 

[blueghost]

Thank you both for your replies. Yes, I am using Zorin, effectively Ubuntu so this method should work ok. Just to be sure, I can make the share available to my windows machine as per the instructions, and then via Nautilus I can direct my linux machines to THAT samba share so all machines can get to it?

Thanks for the information on encryption. That is no big deal I was just interested as I may encrypt in the future.

Thanks again. I enjoy these new challenges.

 

[blueghost]

Thank you both for your replies. Yes, I am using Zorin, effectively Ubuntu so this method should work ok. Just to be sure, I can make the share available to my windows machine as per the instructions, and then via Nautilus I can then direct my linux machines to THAT samba share so all machines can get to it?

Thanks for the information on encryption. That is no big deal I was just interested as I may encrypt in the future.

Thanks again. I enjoy these new challenges.

 

[blueghost]

Thank you everybody who helped me get this going. Works like a charm!
I don't know if the video people watch this, but I think it would help in the video if they make the point that in both win10 and win7 you have to enable all of the samba features in the 'Turn Windows On and Off" panel. I already had it enabled for my small home network but it needed to have the server option enabled. In win7 it was called something different (can't remember what just now). This part hung me up for a little while but its all working exactly as I had hoped.

Great community. Thanks.