Possible to create Home Shares for local users?

[intavg]

I am just setting up my new TrueNAS for home use, and I saw the option to set a share up for Use as Home Share. Looking at the documentation though, this option only works if the NAS is connected to Active Directory, and the users are AD users, is this correct?

I tried following the instructions and changing the group setting to builtin_users but that did not work. I see a folder with my username when I connect from Windows, as well as a share called "homes" but neither one is accessible (Error: "A device attached to the system is not functioning")

This is the documentation I am following: https://www.truenas.com/docs/core/13.0/coretutorials/sharing/smb/homeshare/

 

[anodos]

It will work with local users with some fiddling, but is generally not a great feature. We keep it around because of legacy customers who use it in their environments. If you want users to have private shares / datasets, there's an SMB share preset for "private datasets". You still need to make sure that permissions are set correctly on dataset that is the share target (homes preset owned by builtin_users should work). With this preset we will auto-create ZFS datasets for users as they connect to the share.

 

[intavg]

Ok, thanks. I will switch to private datasets. The more I mess around with home folders the weirder it is getting, nesting things in interesting places.

 

[anodos]

Ok, thanks. I will switch to private datasets. The more I mess around with home folders the weirder it is getting, nesting things in interesting places.

It is a legacy feature that was developed for some customers back in the early days of FreeNAS. When a feature is used by a customer we tend to keep it around for really long time (in this case since FreeNAS 8) out of policy of not introducing breaking changes. Since this feature impacts how shares are presented / data written to disk it will stay with us for the foreseeable future, but that doesn't mean that it's the best option available (which is why it is hidden as an advanced option).