Windows user home folders & some SW on a FreeNAS CIFS share?

[n3mmr]

I'd like to set up 3 small,quiet and cheap W10 machines to keep as much user data and locally installed SW as possible on FreeNAS Cifs shares.
Can this be done, is there anyone here with experience in doing this, and can you advise me on how to??

There are three reasons for wanting this: I want to simulate a thin client environment in order to allow 3 or 4 users to log in on any of 3 identical machines with no important differences depending on which machine they log in on, the machines are VERY small so I don't want to store data locally on these machines if it can be avoided and I don't want to trust these rather cheap machines any further than I need to.

I've tried asking in Windows forums and among people working as consultants on windows deployment to no avail. They merely look surprised and start suggesting OneDrive and Google drive. Or "get a larger machine".

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[Nick2253]

I think you've assumed some solutions here as you're trying to solve your problem. Let's take a step back and evaluate what you're trying to accomplish.

It sounds like your ultimate goal is complete thin clients: minimal machines that only handle basic GUI rendering and interface hardware. However, you also seem to be suggesting a different solution: fully fledged machines where user data and application data are stored/synced centrally.

In the first case, FreeNAS is probably completely inappropriate. There are many possible solutions, but ultimately you need a server providing multiple simultaneous sessions, or a hypervisor running multiple VMs. Then you can use something like ThinStation, Tiny Core, or Open ThinClient on your thin clients. This setup is not trivial, and is typically used in large enterprise environments with expensive software, where the large capital savings can offset the increased licensing costs.

In the second case, the easiest way to handle this is set up a Windows domain with roaming profiles. You can also configure folder redirection for the client's documents, downloads, etc. folders (that way, they don't have to be copied to each machine) to point at the FreeNAS SMB shares. The downside to this approach is that all clients are responsible for running the software (i.e. you're not offloading the processing to a central, powerful server), and each machine still needs to be manually configured. You can use chocolatey to make this task easier, but if your users are manually installing software, then that software will need to be reinstalled on each machine (though their configuration data will still roam with their profile, assuming the application is storing configuration data in the correct folders/registry).

 

[n3mmr]

OK, let's forget the thin client dream, then. And, supposedly, CIFS is not supported, just SMB v2 and later.

I would be happy with

Assign one PC to one particular user.
Arrange for that user's home folder, and possibly his/her profile, to reside on a file server on FreeNAS.

With this I hope to avoid too much data and data writes to the PC's extremely small and not very durable but cheap internal SSD disk.

Can that be done in W10 1709 and later??

 

[Nick2253]

Can that be done in W10 1709 and later??

It can be done with any Windows since at least 2000.

So, I'm assuming you don't have a domain; is that correct? Did you look at "folder redirection"?

Hint: most sources about Folder Redirection are going to point you to GPO solutions, but you can easily do Folder Redirection without a domain. You'll just need to change the appropriate registry keys. Searching for "folder redirection without domain" will get you started.

 

[n3mmr]

Can that be done in w10 home?

I found very few references to folder redirection without domain, and those I found were old and referred to modules and whatnot...

I am not very conversant with windows, being a unix sysadm since -82.

 

[Nick2253]

Did you try searching? The first Google hit for "folder redirection without domain" is a link to a Microsoft Technet discussion with the registry keys you need to set to use it.

As far as Windows Home Edition is concerned, I'm not sure what it does or does not support. I would think that Home would support this feature, however I haven't use a Home edition of Windows in over a decade, so I am not sure what it can do (or not do) any more. A quick search did not reveal any immediate answers.

In general, I would not recommend what you are trying to do, especially in a home environment, where the network isn't nearly as reliable or capable as you'd find in an enterprise. Storing profile data on a NAS is a problem waiting to happen: if your NAS goes down, you would lose access to your profile, which makes troubleshooting very difficult. And any network performance issues can tank your machine. Bootup will also be slower, and any time the NAS must be restarted, you will probably have to restart all the clients (or at least log out/log back in).

There's also really no reason to redirect your Document/Downloads/Etc. folder to a NAS. If you can train your users to use it, creating a mounted drive with all their data will be easier to support, in my opinion, with all the same benefits. If you wanted to get fancy, you could create a small script that checks the common folders, and if your users put something there, it pops up a reminder to use the mounted drive.

Especially if you're not an experienced Windows admin, I'm worried that this solution would create a bunch of problems with reliability and performance that would be very difficult to fix or troubleshoot without that experience. Keeping it simple with a mounted drive seems, to me, to be the best option, especially since you don't have a domain controller to help with the configuration management.

 

[PhilipS]

Arrange for that user's home folder, and possibly his/her profile, to reside on a file server on FreeNAS.

You can change the location of the Documents folder on the Location tab of the Documents Properties dialog (Right click on Documents inside the users profile folder). You will need to do the Pictures, Videos, and Music folders separately. I would keep the Desktop folder local and tell users not to store documents on the desktop. Moving the desktop to the file server may cause the desktop icons to flicker.

If you have snapshots configured on the dataset, you get the Windows Previous Version feature too.

I don't have a clue on how to move the entire profile to the server on Win10 Home.

And, supposedly, CIFS is not supported, just SMB v2 and later.

CIFS was a particular version of SMB that is old, but people still call SMB CIFS sometimes, including FreeNAS up until recently. So you can think of them as synonyms, even though that is technically incorrect. SMB v2 and v3 work on FreeNAS.

 

[n3mmr]

I myself am in the bad habit of storing all my SW downloads and documentation in folders on Desktop, on my Litre sized Asus desktop box.
I suppose one could just as well put links to directories on the NAS in Desktop. I don't keep these bits directly on the Desktop, but rather under folders named like Installers, SWDocs, HWdocs and so on and so forth. I just find it easier than going down in Download and look at a list of 300 files. And similar for Documents.

P.S. Being a Unix guy since 1982 I find the Windows way to be brotherly, BIG brotherly.... But, alas, there we are.