Trying to share drive with Windows 7 via iSCSI

[Stupify]

I am using FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE-p1x64. I am trying to achieve the following: I want to share a drive on the FreeNAS system with Windows computers thus both system seeing the drive and can read/write it. I have another drive that I want to share similarly but limit it to read-only. How would you go about setting this up?

I have played around with CIFS and iSCSI and this is what I have found.

CIFS Option: I know I can achieve this by using CIFS share but that's not so clean as Windows 7's security blocks running programs from network mapped drive and requires me to always type the full network path to be able to run the program (at least the installation program).

iSCSI Option: I tried to set that up with FreeNAS and here is what I have found:
1) A disk that's been mounted cannot be setup as a Target in iSCSI. Is this always true or is there a way to get around it?
2) A iSCSI target cannot be mounted. Is this always true or is there a way to get around it?
3) How do I Target folder from a mounted disk?

 

[Stupify]

noobsauce80,

thanks for you suggestion. Here is some small history:
I had limited experience with any form of RAID aside from the basic knowledge how each of the raids worked. ZFS and RAIDZ is new to me, so was FreeNAS. However, during a conversation about how I wanted to setup a backup system a friend mentioned to me about how he has setup FreeNAS and is using RAID5 (I am assuming he just used the standard term instead of RAIDZ). That got me checking out FreeNAS and the ZFS and RAIDZ. My goal eventually is to "update" all my house computers to the new "systems architecture" and to avoid shared-worthy files fragmented everywhere.

I actually have FreeNAS setup on VirtualBox and have setup CIFS share password protected as well as a virtual disk drive setup for iSCSI Target. I am able to access both the CIFS share and the iSCSI target from my Windows 7 host computer as well. I have even tested copying data and executing programs from them - so far no issues (Windows 7 has no issues running the executable). I have even tested successfully with Read-only and authenticated access to the CIFS share.

The least I was hoping to get out of these posts are:
1) Is it possible to do what I am asking for?
2) If not, what is the closest I can get to?
3) Any steps/links to help me get there are added bonus

PS#1: I tend to post even dumb/simple questions sometimes in the hope I might learn something new or see a different/better approach used by others to address those situations.
PS#2: I am searching/reading plenty of information on google/youtube and blogs on how and what people have done.

So thanks in advance for any helpful responses.

 

[Stupify]

any suggestions/comments if it is possible to attain what I am pondering?

 

[survive]

Hi Stupify,

The short answer is don't do what you are trying to do with iscsi.

You should not "share" a disk between two computers like that because there's nothing in iscsi that helps to maintain consistency on the disk. Sure, you can have multiple machines accessing storage via iscsi if they are cluster-aware, but if you this with regular systems that's a sure way to corrupt your data.

A better way to proceed would be to use CIFS and figure out what settings in windows are preventing you from running your programs from the share.

-Will

 

[Stupify]

Thanks Will.

I am now convinced that I should stick with CIFS as it allows me to control permissions better and the odd behavior is only happening with VirtualBox's Guest-OS' network mapped drive to Shared Folders. The benefit I have with CIFS over iSCSI is that CIFS allows me to control access by giving only authenticated read-only access to common folders and read-write to individual folders. So I will map two drives on everyone's computers - common drive and personal backup drive. To put something in the common folders, it will be a manual access with a separate id to ensure only I can do that and limit virus exposure time.

FreeNAS os will stay as the choice simply because of the services it provides and simple interface to configure them.

Thanks everyone :)