You can find my FreeNAS posts/Tutorials here:
- FreeNAS – switching back. About my decision to move back to FreeNAS from Windows Home Server.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part One – Installation – installing the FreeNAS server onto a PC. (this post)
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Two – Configuration – configuring FreeNAS and Windows File Sharing.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Three – Upgrading – Upgrading your FreeNAS Server.
- Using Microsoft SyncToy 2 with FreeNAS – Automating your backups – for free.
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part Five – XBOX 360 – Using FreeNAS with your XBOX 360
- FreeNAS Tutorial for Windows Users – Part 6 – Adding another drive
In Part One we installed FreeNAS onto our server. In this section we configure FreeNAS to allow Windows File Sharing and network browsing.
1. Open a browser and type in the IP address of your server (in our example from Part One the IP address was 192.168.1.250. A Logon Dialog will appear:
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The login name is “admin” and the password is “freenas”. Enter this and click enter. |
| 2. The main configuration screen appears as below. There are MANY options here – but most users will only need to change a few of them. The first thing we will do is change the default password. On the left hand navigation click “General” under system settings. |  |
| 3. Click the Password tab. |  |
| 4. Enter the old password and then the new password in the dialog – the new password is entered twice. |  |
5. Click back to the General Tab.
- Here you can rename your server. The default name is freenas, and that works for me. Feel free to change it. I haven’t played with this so I would stick with a single word with no spaces or odd characters.
- If you are on a domain you can change the default. I’m just on a Workgroup, so I’ll leave this as local.
- For added security you can change the admin name to something else.
- Change the time zone so it reflects your location.
- Click the Enable NTP checkbox to allow the server to update the clock over the Internet.
6. Before configuring anything else we will reboot the server and make sure that we can still login with our new credentials. On the left navigation under system click on Reboot, then click on Yes.
7. The system will only take a minute or so to reboot. Refresh your browser window and type in your new credentials. Next we prepare the shared drive.
| 8. From the Navigation Menu select Management under Disks. In the screen displayed click the circle with the plus in it to add a new disk. |  |
9. There are three things to change on this page:
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10. Now we need to set the mount point. Under Disks select mount point.
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11. Now we set up sharing. On the Navigation Menu select CIFS/SMB from the Services menu.
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12. Now on the CIFS/SMB page click the “Shares” tab up top
Almost done! One more thing to set up. |
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13. Under Services click on NFS.
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That’s it! As you can see there are a lot of settings we didn’t mess with. You may want to, or need to change some of these. That is beyond the scope of this simple tutorial.
So let’s go test our new server!
First, the browser test. In your web browser type \\servername and press enter (since I called my server freenas, I type \\freenas\ into my web browser and the following dialog appears:
As you can see – this is a standard Windows Explorer view showing my server and the share I created, Data. There is no printer installed on my server, and I haven’t played with that option, but the printer icon shows as well.
Now I can map a network drive using the UNC of \\freenas\data.
That’s all there is to it. You can go and add additional shares to point to subdirectories in Data – I created folders called Music, Pictures, Movies, Videos, and Users (where I created folders for me and my kids). You can also set up users and groups and limit access to these shares based on the user/group.
There are a ton of features I haven’t even discussed. This tutorial just focused on getting the Windows File Sharing and Browsing set up. The FreeNAS Knowledgebase has a ton of additional information.
) Comments for STUFFLEUFAGUS – 
FreeNAS is knocking me down. It seems like the group authorizations are ineffective. There are groups that I have in my ID but cannot get to unless my username is in the user for the folder.
I am missing something basic or FreeNAS is completely broken. Help, please.
drwxr—– 10 mikey classroom 512 Mar 23 16:46 classroom
if it says classroom classroom, mikey cannot get to it although classroom is listed as a group in mikey (via CIFS/SMB to Windows XP). Same problem for other users/groups. What am I missing?
FreeNAS version 0.7.1 Shere (revision 5065)
Mike
Hi Mike,
Did you try to enable permission inheritance in CIFS/SMB Shares?
Alex
I finally gave up. The actual trouble was that, in my newbie state, I was setting the top level (/mnt/directory) permissions to drwxrwx— as that seemed like the secure way to do it. That meant that I was the only one who could see anything below. It seems insecure to have “public” have total permissions on the top level directory. When I set it off, everything stopped except for me, as owner of that directory. I was so new that I did not connect that action with the following lockout. Sometimes it was several days before the second action followed the first. I finally realized it must be drwxrwxrwx to function. I got no help on freenas.org/forum, just sarcasm and beratement for being new to all of this *nix and Free* stuff. I never did figure out how to edit a file on FreeNAS.
But moreover, FreeNAS is exceptionally fragile. I have worked with it for over a month and installed in various configurations with and without CF and/or Flash thumb drive. When I could get it to work, it would work for a while then break in one of several different ways. It was too much trouble and I have to have a dependable solution for my business.
The final time, I was loading up one of the two drives in the box. I decided to stop and exposed another share in CIFS on the other drive so I could push the 100Mbps line to the max. I did this and restarted the loading of the share I was previously loading and… nothing! There was an error message about an access problem (I forget the exact wording). So I rebooted but never could get to a share on either disk again. That’s just too fragile! I wish it was more robust. Would love to work with a developer but I guess development is going to OpenVault(whatever) now.
That’s the way it stands right now. Powered down for good, I expect. I am stubborn, stayed with this project far too long and really wanted it to work but, alas, it has beaten me. About 5-6 weeks of learning and screaming and beating my head against the wall has ended. It feels good to stop. I am still irritated but it will pass. 3 motherbords/3 power supplies/4 different hard drives/CF/Thumb/various other options… All a total waste.
Network performance GREAT. I could easily hit 85Mbps loading one drive, 98-99Mbps loading 2 different drives (when it worked).
Product performance LOUSY!!!
Netgear ReadyNAS Duo ordered today. Off to the commercial solution zone.
Mike Morrow
I gave up on Freenas. The problems I experienced solved themselves but the network performance was too poor. I have a cabled Gigabyte network but the performance from Freenas was slower than that of a 100 network. I finally installed Vista on the NAS machine which is overkill but good performance.
Great tutorial installed Freenas and I am up and running now just have to tweak it to my flavor Thank you keep up the good work !
Art
i was having trouble too with permissions, and i finally figured out that you can easily change the permissions for directories with the QuiXplorer file manager. Just go into /mnt and then your network share and in the right hand column called Perm’s, you can click the permissions and change them so anybody can write to them. Problem solved.
Thanks Dave
this solved my problems.!!!!
Hi,
Why do you say that we must put the dropdown partition on 2 ?
Can we have multiple share at the same level of data ?
Thanks
Hi,
thanks for the tutorial. I followed the steps and made my Freenas shares reappear. I have two Vista machines in my network and 1 Freenas server. Suddenly on one machine windows explorer doesn’t show the Freenas server anymore under network, only the Upnp server is shown. On the other machine explorer shows both server and shares. I can bring back the share with the \\freenas\ in the command line but how is it possible that explorer doesn’t show freenas anymore?
Thanks, Flip
Please, help? I have tried physically with the same result as SSH (logically).
I also tried putting in the “auxiliary parameters” writeable = yes and read only = no. It’s a hard drive connected by USB. I can write with the user root connected by SSH but not in the Windows access. Again, any ideas?
I would be eternally grateful for a little help. Thanks
Manu.
Hey man, really thanks for the tutorial. It was very useful to me. But I have a little question, that is what I am writing you.
The case is , as the people above, that I am not able of write in the shared folders. I have tried the solution of @Tony but it didn’t work for me. (I did by SSH, should I do it physically in the server?).
For example, I have:
freenas:/mnt# ls -la
[...]
drwxrwxrwx 4 root wheel 512 Sep 5 11:55 interno
drwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32768 Jan 1 1980 usb
Then I do:
freenas:/mnt# chmod 777 usb
But as you can see, I get the same result.
freenas:/mnt# ls -la
total 38
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 512 Sep 5 11:47 .
drwxr-xr-x 19 root wheel 512 Sep 5 13:50 ..
drwxrwxrwx 4 root wheel 512 Sep 5 11:55 interno
drwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 32768 Jan 1 1980 usb
freenas:/mnt#
Any ideas?
Sorry for my E
@nine – I didn’t post your long-winded f-bomb laden comments because you sir, are an idiot! Of COURSE I didn’t make FreeNAS. Any twelve year old could figure that out. Grow up. Get out of the tech industry – you have neither the attitude or the aptitude for it.
Rob
yeah i bet you dont post my comment. CAUSE YOU MAKE SHITTY APPLICATIONS and probably cant take the fact that they’re SHIT.
go on, ban me. CAUSE YOUR CRAP, and ALL YOUR SOFTWARE IS SHIT!!!
Can you re-post your long-winded rant? You sound like a real f-tard and a lot of us get a real pick me up from idiots like yourself. Feel free to create a new one if the mood hits you… dummy.
Hears LOAO at you,
Troy
I installed freenas but created a software RAID configuration with 2 drives – now I cannot select this configuration for the mount part of the instructions. Also when the machine boots it always needs to boot from the CD – how can it be actually installed on a system with two raid drives?
hey im really having some trouble here, i set it up fine i believe, followed all the steps exactly. when i went to \\freenas\data i made folders called videos and music. when i tried to add movies to my videos folder it says I only have 6 gigs but my hard drive is 500gb.. what do i do? im really stuck
Thanks a lot for sharing your Knowlegdes
@Andy – really glad it helped. This series still gets a ton of hits – this long after I wrote it. Wish I could do an update. I know much has changed. Just don’t have the time right now.
Anyway, happy to be of service!
Rob
Rob, thanks so much for this whole tutorial series. I just followed your instructions to the letter, and now my office of 8 has a FreeNAS server made entirely from duct tape, along with lots of SyncToyed PCs. And they think I’m a genius.
Andy
I believe that the problem some people are having with FreeNAS and SMB/CIFS is to do with the installation of single drive Systems. When putting shares in the mnt/ path and not using a mount point pointing to another partition or drive there are security issues. This is not a bug it is by design, to prevent the System being more easily hacked.
Cheers
Good luck
Yeah you could scrap the freeNas and just use LinuxSME. It seems like FreeNAS has alot of bugs.
Help please!!.
I cannot get my freenas system to stop asking for guest password.
I have followed instructions detailed above but to no avail. I have completely reinstalled but all is the same.
Does anybody have any clues?
Dave
I could add, i see a lot of errors like the following, and would image it has to do with this …
Feb 26 16:50:00 winbindd[2452]: [2009/02/26 16:50:00, 0] nsswitch/winbindd_group.c:winbindd_getgrent(1110)
Feb 26 16:50:00 winbindd[2452]: could not lookup domain group wins users
Hello,
I love the easy set-up of FreeNAS. But I am stuck with one issue … Our original windows file server blew out. Now the data are on another machine on a spare disk. It is now time to move them to the FreeNAS server, but I would like to preserve the Ownership and Access permissions. How would I go about this. If I simply copy the data to the FreeNAS server, what belonged to the group “users” before now all belongs to “ingo”. It must be some problem with the Server talking to the domain server or so, but I am clueless. Any ideas ?
Thanks Tony, had the same issue, working now.
why cant i set up a user for a share ,, when i set up local user instead of anounamous and add a user and group ,, when i try to access the server fom windows i get the user and password but when i click ok i get an error from windows saying “YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO USE THE NETROWRK RESOURSE CONTACT BLA BLA BLA,,, MULTIBLE CONECTIONS TO SHARE OR RESORSE BY THE SAME USER… can anyone help
@humanform – thanks. I’m glad the post helped, even if it is becoming a bit outdated now.
Worked great. I spent a lot of time trying to figure this out before coming across this. Thank you so much!
@Jeff – thanks. As much as I love FreeNAS, I have been neglectful of this thread. I am *so* pleased to seeing you helping each other!
Rob
Had the same problem. Make sure that the share NAME appears at the end of the PATH. For example NAME = data, PATH = /mnt/NAS_SHARE/data or you could just leave PATH as /mnt/NAS_SHARE, but would be limited to configuration options. NAS_SHARE appeared by default under the /mnt point when I installed. Originally had it as /mnt/data, but would prompt for user name and password. Once I corrected as mentioned above, the user prompt went away. All I did after that was map a drive to \\freenas\data.
What is the guest password? help
I have tried every way I know how along with going through this tutorial and I cannot access my shares using Cif. It always pops up the window for a guest user and wants a password. My authentication is set to anonymous, I added my network in NFS as well as in cifs but still no luck. Running the latest version of FreeNas.
Sound familiar, all I did was cut and paste the problem. I have reinstalled to start clean several times.I want away from Microsoft. I ran my Novell server for 15 years or so. freebsd is next, if I can get freenas running.
Its 12:30 am – will look for an answer. Thanks Harry
i have install freenas seprate mox now it is working fine i am via IE http:\\172.16.0.10 on windows box everything working fine i want to know how to configure NFS server on freenas.
i try enable the nfs option and setting , services enable map the all user root -> YES
path how to give ( already fedora7 box is there i am configure nfs i give that box ip or freenas machine ip and after path default /mnt) pls any one help me
@Anthony – if you create the directory on FreeNAS, can WinXP see it, read from it?
Help needed to properly setup FreeNAS to work with Win XP.
Win XP can see freeNAS but cannot make a directory or write data.
Is there a common misconfiguration that causes this?
Can someone walk me through FreeNAS setting to get it fully operational with
Win XP?
FTP services from WinXP to FreeNAS is fine however.
Please help me. I am totally lost. Any clues appreciated. Thank you in advance.
PS. Your help pages are great.
Hello, I also had problems mounting the FreeNAS SMB share from a Windows PC connected to a domain. It always poped up asking for password for the NetBIOSName/Guest user. My problem was that I had not set up FreeNAS with the same DNS server as the windows pc and the domain. The second problem I encounterd were that I typed a mount folder that was not yet created on the shared drive under the SMB/CIFS Shares. I created the folder with 777 rights from shell on the freenas and once I had set the first DNS on freenas the same as the windows pc it worked fine to access the share anonymnous.
bJøRn
@Julian – thanks – glad they helped. At some point I’ll catch up in this new job and I’ll re-do the tutorials with the latest version of FreeNAS
– Rob
Rob, thank you. You’ve got me out of hole. The installation guide of the FreeNAS website did not include the bit about adding Shares to the CIFS/SMB configuration.
The part of your tutorial that is not like the webGUI I have is the setup of NFS. On the version I have got – 0.686.4, the latest stable version – there is also a ‘Shares’ tab where the authorised network is added, rather like the CIFS/SMB setup. It was common sense and all your other instructions worked a dream.
Thanks for a great set of tutorials.
I have a computer on my network that is usually logged into a domain and therefore is not in the same workgroup as the rest of my PCs. All the other PCs that are in the workgroup can connect to the freenas server and view the CIF/SMB shares. However if I point the computer that is in the domain at the shares I get a guest logon (where guest is grayed out) and password prompt. Nothing works. How can I get this computer connected to the shares? Thanks.
@Tony – thanks for the additional information. I wonder why you ran into this and I never have? I’ve installed FreeNAS dozens of times and have never had to issue a single command via the shell. Odd – but do appreciated the added knowledge!
I was having the same issues as the rest regarding the setup of CIFS shares. The rest of your tutorial works like a charm except for the section where I had to do a bit of Unix hacking to get it to work. In my particular situation I was unable to create new folders inside the mount points that I created in NFS and in CIFS. The work around that I used was to do the following from the console on the freenas server:
1. From “Console setup” select “6) Shell”
2. cd /mnt to get to the mount points in your freenas server
3. ls -la to get a directory listing and permissions of the items in the /mnt directory
4. Issue the command chmod 777 data or whatever the name of the directory is that you want to change the write permissions.
You should now be able to write files to the share that you created. You will need to do this going forward for any new directories that you create in freenas.
I had the same issue and added a share to the Data directory.
Path Name Comment Browseable
/mnt/Data/ Root Data Root No
Then went to \\nas\root
Then i created my folders then pointed the shares to it.
I had to manually add the “read only = no” value to the share I created in the smb.conf file in order to write to the Samba share using version 0.686.
Rob, Netmask should be set to 24 on NFS service.
@Marvin – can you save your configuration and send it to me (email is in upper left). I’ll see if I can figure it out.
I have tried every way I know how along with going through this tutorial and I cannot access my shares using Cif. It always pops up the window for a guest user and wants a password. My authentication is set to anonymous, I added my network in NFS as well as in cifs but still no luck. Running the latest version of FreeNas.
@FeroS – I covered this NFS setting in step #13 ahead. Do you think I need to change it, or is the step written clearly?
@FeroS – I’ll review my tutorial and make sure I make that step very clear.
Yes. Now it is O.K. Thank you
There are several people with the same problem on the SourceForge FreeNAS forum.
@FeroS – did you put your local subnet into NFS|Authorized Networks? I put my subnet in there and leave the CIFS/SMB/Share/Hosts allow set to ALL.
I have added my IP in CIFS/SMB / Shares / path / Hosts allow. And it works.
)
It does not work in Anonymous or Local user mode without my IP address.
I think there is problem of the longtime Windows user with UNIX reality
@FeroS – Sounds like you don’t have CIFS/SMB authentication set to anonymous. My tutorial doesn’t cover user authentication – my LAN is secure, and I assume those within my LAN are trusted.
Set the authentication to anonymous and try it again.
CIFS/SMB does not work for me.
FreeNAS need name/passwd (or guest !!! / passwd).
But User in the Group/User is not accepted.
No problem with “FTP”. It works fine.
@Shannon – thanks for letting me know it worked for you!
Worked like a charm. Thank you for the amazing set of instructions.