Can it also act as a DFS share?
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jean-Christian Chevalier Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 1:05 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] NAS SMB server (QNAP?) QNAP appliances can be integrated in AD and it works well. You basically add it to your domain as you would a Windows PC. Then you can set up permissions for the shares you define on the NAS using AD groups and/or users. I have one in use at a small business since 2 years (model TS-459U-SP+). It is a domain member and the only problem I had with it was due to a power loss. I would definitively recommend having it connected to a UPS (which is now the case at this customer). It is used as a secondary file server and is accessed from Windows PCs, in the same way the main SBS 2008 file server is accessed. From an end user perspective, it works exactly the same. So SMB is working fine. The web UI is easy to use and no Linux knowledge is needed. Everything can be configured from the web UI and you do not need to configure Samba manually. They now have SMB 2.0 available on their new QTS OS 4.0. I have no experience with it yet, but will have soon. I'm also using one at my home office, since more than 3 years and had no problem with it. However it is not AD integrated. I can recommend it for the use you describe. JCC On 28.10.2013 19:06, Ben Scott wrote: SHORT VERSION Anyone here used the QNAP appliances as an SMB file server ("Windows File Sharing") in an Active Directory environment? How'd it go? (Not as an iSCSI target or other block-level protocol.) LONG VERSION I'm looking for what will basically be a network-attached disk drive. Non-critical file storage for things like ISO images, hard disk images, archives of old user files, installation sources, that sort of thing. SMB will be the protocol. Clients will be Win 7, XP, and that one Win 2000 computer I just can't get rid of. Permissions will be pretty simple, basically a couple of groups, read-only/read-write/none, pull from and authenticate to our Active Directory. No interest in running any applications on the box, nor doing anything more than file copies to/from it. We're not going to be running application off it (unless you count installers). No block level protocols like iSATA, ATA-over-Ethernet, etc. Hardware will be twin mirrored 4TB disks, maybe a third sometimes gets attached to make an offline backup. Rack mount. One option would be a Dell R210-II running CentOS Linux, Linux kernel software RAID, Samba, etc. I've done that before. It works. But management here is concerned that good Linux people are harder to find than Windows people. They don't like that my minions don't have expertise with such systems. So I'm considering something that comes with a bit more hand-holding, a bit more "ready-to-go, out-of-the-box". And NAS hardware can be cheaper than general-purpose server hardware. Specifically, I'm looking at the QNAP TS-412U. Four bays, what looks like a decent web UI, claims to do Active Directory integration. All sorts of flashy bells and whistles we'll never use, but oh well. It's significantly cheaper than most rack-mount general-purpose servers will be. But if their SMB stuff is borken (I presume they're using Samba, but how you configure Samba matters a lot), it's no good to me. Thoughts/suggestions/experiences/etc. welcomed. -- Ben
