Hi all,

I am usually just "lurking" here - I am (at the moment) a FreeBSD sysadmin 
exessively working with ZFS and jails and all that stuff (the plans to use 
OpenSolaris are more or less abandoned for a while..)

Anyway, at the moment I am trying to work out good options for Samba4 on 
ZFS.

The following is based on my own understanding after reading FreeBSD and 
Solaris mailing list and forums for a while. So please correct me if 
there is anything wrong or outdated.

ZFS is supporting NFSv4 ACLs while samba is built with POSIX ACLs (and 
obviously Linux) in mind.

I see, for Solaris as well for FreeBSD, advice to use ntvfs for ZFS, a new 
development for samba4 that did not mature. So smbd was brought back, 
called s3fs now.

However, this one is built on top of POSIX ACLs. ZFS does not support 
them.

So the only choice seems to be the "unfinished" ntvfs server which is 
miles behind in SMB implementation, if I understand correctly.

However, there seems to be, under FreeBSD, a libsunacl which can be linked 
with samba4.

"Libsunacl is a wrapper around FreeBSD NFSv4 ACL API (acl_get_file(3) 
etc), providing SunOS-compatible acl(3)/facl(3) functions. Its main 
purpose is to make it easier to port software such as Samba, which already 
supports SunOS ACL API."

I found a "quite definitive" sounding mail from Andrew Bartlett 
(23/4/2013) saying: "Currently the Samba 4.0 AD DC is hard-coded to use 
only a POSIX ACL based filesystem.  OpenIndiana supports this, but you 
won't be able to deploy this on ZFS, which uses NFSv4 ACLs."

https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2013-April/172922.html

I also went through the smbd sources and found some functions and macros 
in vfs.c and filesys.h related to aide various backends but could not see 
whether there are any hooks that would help to apply them to NFSv4 
ACL-aware filesystems.

According to other mails smbd does not provide proper separation of code 
from the vfs layer but I did not dig far enough to judge it.

I used samba2/3 on Solaris in the past. The Samba team always insisted in 
having "more than Linux" in mind, especially pointing to "large 
organisations using samba on Solaris". So I am a bit surprised about the 
lack of support here, although I understand the urge to roll out Samba4 
over the few months. It is a huge task.

I wonder whether you are using samba4 on Solaris, use s3fs or ntvfs, and 
whether you know about plans related to samba4 on ZFS (and more about the 
Samba4 roadmap in general)

I even considered "weird plans" to put UFS on ZFS volumes which may work 
but it isn't really elegant.

I am happy about all advice and comments.

Thank you
Peter

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