Fester's Very Basic One User/One Dataset Experimental Starter Share

Fester is still learning about shares and in particular share permissions.

As Fester learns more I will try to pass on what I have learned by adding to this section and creating additional guides for more “real world” share scenarios (if time permits).

This particular share will not be much use to most people, but it will get you going.

Don’t forget the official FreeNAS guide has lots of information on shares. But for now, this will be a very basic share on a FreeNAS system and is designed to get you started so you can experiment with shares.

This share is designed for one user who wants to access the same share from different client machines.

The client machines will mostly be running Windows (or Mac OS X).

It will utilise one dataset and show you how to share it.

It is designed to get you started with shares so that you can experiment.

Go to the “Accounts” page (1) and click the “Add Group” button (2).

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A new smaller window will pop up. Here we can create a new Group.

Leave the “Group ID:” at its default value of 1001 (1).

Now type in a name for the new group in the “Group Name:” text box (2) (because this is a starter share from which you can experiment, Fester used TestGroup).

Do not tick the “Permit Sudo:” or “Allow repeated GIDs:” tick boxes (3).

Now click the “OK” button (4).

If all goes well an entry should appear in the Account → Groups page. You should see something like this.

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Now go to the “Accounts” page (1) and click the “Users” button (2).

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A new window will pop up. Here we can create a new User.

Leave the “User ID:” at its default value of 1001 (1).

Now type in a name for the new user in the “Username:” text box (2) (because this is a starter share from which you can experiment, Fester used TestUser).

Untick the “Create a new primary group for the user:” tick box (3).

The “Primary Group:” drop down selection box (4) should now become active. The group we created earlier (i.e. TestGroup) should be available for selection.

Leave the “Create Home Directory In:” text box at the default /nonexistent (5).

Leave “Shell:” at its default setting (6).

Type in a name for the new user (7) (Fester chose Test User).

Create a password in the “Password:” text box and confirm it by retyping it in the “Password Confirmation:” text box (8) (because this is a starter share to experiment with Fester just used test. Make sure you use a stronger and less predictable password when you create your real/final share/s).

Now scroll down.

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Do not tick the “Disable password login:” you will lock yourself out of the share.

Leave the “Lock user:” and “Permit Sudo:” at their default settings of unticked (9).

Fester will be accessing this account from a windows machine so I tick the “Microsoft Account:” tick box (10).

Now click the “OK” button (11).

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Now we need to create the dataset.

Go to the “Storage” page.

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Select “Tank1” or whatever you called the volume (1) by clicking on it (it should turn blue when selected).

A series of buttons should appear on the bottom of the screen.

From these buttons click on the one that creates a dataset (2).

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A new smaller window will pop up for creating the dataset.

In the “Dataset Name:” text box (1) give the share a name (because this is a starter share from which you can experiment, Fester used TestShare).

Leave the “Compression level:” drop down selection box (2) set to lz4.

Set the “Share type:” to whatever suits the type of clients on your network (Fester has mainly Windows machines so I set this to Windows).

Leave the “Case Sensitivity:” drop down selection box and “Enable atime:” at their default settings as shown (4).

“ZFS Deduplication:” should be set to off in the drop down selection box (5) unless you understand this and you have plenty of memory.

Now click the “Add Dataset” button (6).

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The dataset will now be created and you should see something like this.

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Remain on this screen and select the newly created dataset (1) if it is not selected already (in Fester’s case this was TestShare).

Now click on the change permissions button (2).

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