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Tutor

Jan 01, 2019

Solved

RN314 samba custom username map

I just switched from a RN Ultra 4 running OS4 to a RN314 OS6. On the old NAS I was able to setup a custom samba username map so our multiple computers usernames would correctly map to the appropriat...

File Sharing

jjcf89_2
Feb 11, 2019
StephenB wrote:

jjcf89_2 wrote:

StephenB wrote:

jjcf89_2 wrote:
However, the boss of the company has several computers all with different usernames and he's the only one that uses the home folder feature.

Just enter a single credential in the Windows Credential Manager on his PCs. Then there's no need to map anything for him on the NAS.

Hmm, that's a new one to me. I'll have to look that up and see what I can do. Thanks.

Just to clarify - the credential would be the username/password of his (single) NAS user account, and would be for NAS access from his PCs. If he accesses the NAS by both IP address and hostname, then you'd enter one credential for each.

Okay. I've had decent success at doing it this way. Note the method is a bit of a pain in the ass, mostly because Windows won't let you log in using a different account.

So my process so far has been:

Log into PC

Disconnect all mounted shares

Open Credential Manage and on Windows Credential tab, remove any remembered credentials for NAS

Log out and back in

Access NAS to non-anonymous share and Enter correct credentials and check remember box. This usually errors out with "can't authenticate multiple accounts..."

Log out and back in

Access NAS to non-anonymous share and everything should be working. Windows did remember the password from last step even though it failed.

Check credential manager again just to make sure username looks correct now.

Setup mounted shares

Repeat above steps for \\ipaddress if users are prone to accessing NAS via IP

Note: I usually

tail -f /var/log/samba/log.smbd

and watch to make sure I do see it correctly authenticating.

Sandshark

Sensei

Jan 03, 2019

If you do a configuration backup on a "master" NAS of just users and groups, you can upload that to the other NASes, but don't manually assign any users or groups on the other NASes. Then, all the user ID's will be the same on all NASes. Note that you cannot do this between OS4.x and 6.x NASes, but you can on units with a common core (e.g all OS6 based).

Now, any time you add a user or group, do it on the master, backup again, and upload to the others. Never manually add a user or group to any of the NASes other than the master. If they are all in sync, you can re-designate which you consider "master".

The backups are csv files in a zip. Once you take a look at them, you can get clever, too. Just make sure you use the right EOL (LF, not CRLF). But you can't get clever enough to transfer between NAS families because the default UIDs and GIDs are different. (Something Netgear should have thought about when they developed OS6.)

jjcf89_2

Tutor

Jan 03, 2019

Sandshark wrote:

If you do a configuration backup on a "master" NAS of just users and groups, you can upload that to the other NASes, but don't manually assign any users or groups on the other NASes. Then, all the user ID's will be the same on all NASes. Note that you cannot do this between OS4.x and 6.x NASes, but you can on units with a common core (e.g all OS6 based).

Now, any time you add a user or group, do it on the master, backup again, and upload to the others. Never manually add a user or group to any of the NASes other than the master. If they are all in sync, you can re-designate which you consider "master".

The backups are csv files in a zip. Once you take a look at them, you can get clever, too. Just make sure you use the right EOL (LF, not CRLF). But you can't get clever enough to transfer between NAS families because the default UIDs and GIDs are different. (Something Netgear should have thought about when they developed OS6.)

Note you apparently can import an OS4 backup into an OS6 NAS and it won't stop you. What did happen is it overwrote a bunch of system users in /etc/passwd that messed things up. I grabbed a backup of the /etc/passwd file and manually fixed the mess.

I don't see why users from OS4 would be an issue to transfer over to OS6. Even if the default UIDs are different they still seem to work. I wish I had thought to manually update the backup file. Instead, I manually merged users into the passwd, group, shadow, smbpasswd, and the samba database files to transfer them from OS4 to OS6.

Sandshark
Sensei
Jan 04, 2019
jjcf89_2 wrote:

I don't see why users from OS4 would be an issue to transfer over to OS6. Even if the default UIDs are different they still seem to work. I wish I had thought to manually update the backup file. Instead, I manually merged users into the passwd, group, shadow, smbpasswd, and the samba database files to transfer them from OS4 to OS6.

It has been a very long time since I looked at it, but I thought there was something that overlapped in such a way that it didn't work. Maybe it was default users on one having the same UID as added users on the other. I guess you could get around that if you were just doing a complete transfer and could re-assign UID's. I was looking for a way to create a program that would do it, and didn't see an easy way. Basically, I was going to try to do Netgear's job for them. At the time, I was going to have both OS4.2 and OS6 NASes concurrently.
StephenB
Guru - Experienced User
Jan 04, 2019
Sandshark wrote:
At the time, I was going to have both OS4.2 and OS6 NASes concurrently.

My Pro-6 is still on 4.2.31 (it's only for backup, so there was no reason to change it).

It is possible to assign UIDs and GIDs that match to user accounts. The bigger problem is that the UID/GID for guest accounts (including nobody/nogroup) can't be matched.

We access the NAS using admin credentials anyway, so I set up my shares (OS 4 and OS 6) so that all files are owned by admin. That is mapped correctly in rsync backup jobs, so owner/group is preserved.