On Tue, 2005-07-26 at 14:06 +1000, Nick Bryant wrote:
Hi,
I currently use Samba server as a PDC on a centos 3.5 box for a bunch of XP clients which works perfectly.</centos plug>
I want to mount a share on a NAS box we have kicking about and use that share to put all the users home dirs in. Sadly my NAS box is a Windows 2003 server appliance (although, to be fair - it does the job).
So I create a share on the NAS box, create a user on the Samba server who I then assign write permissions on the newly created share (yes, the NAS is a domain member) and then put the NAS share's details into the Samba server's /etc/fstab like so:
\nasboxen\newshare /mnt/userhomes smbfs auto,credentials=/etc/samba/afile 0 0
mount -a /mnt/syd01-test/
and it mounts perfectly:
[root@lemon mnt]# mount [snip] //nasboxen/newshare on /mnt/userhomes type smbfs (0)
Now the problem comes when I want to put a userdir in there because when I try and set the ownership:
[root@lemon mnt]# chown nick testing chown: changing ownership of `testing': Operation not permitted
I presume this is because it's a smb filesystem and it doesn't support unix ownership flags. So the question is... can it be done?
---- You can't have user permissions on 'foreign' file systems - all files and folders are owned by whomever mounts it.
You can download for free - Microsoft's SFU (Services for Unix) and create NFS exports from the NAS Appliance and mount them on the Linux/Unix system and share them but be prepared for some latency (I sort of gave up on this concept myself). You could also create a 'DFS' tree that has the 'base' on the Linux server and the subtrees on the NAS appliance.
Of course there is no reason that you can't direct Samba to create Windows Users 'HOMES' share directly on/from the NAS appliance itself and that is likely the best/fastest way to do it. Since the NAS Server is 'joined' to the domain, it will have all the user accounts and can happily deal with the ACL's for the home share.
With Samba 3.0.x and LDAP or tdbsam backend, you can specify a unique home and profile directory for each user and put them on different servers if you wish.
Craig