Free NAS products and Active Directory

Round 1 Integrating Samba 4 Active Directory

• Configured Samba 4 AD, so Windows 7 computer could join domain with no issues.
• FreeNAS - joined domain, can list the users. Users are not allowed in, though. Probably no magic to be expected - need to create local users and map them to AD users? Seems not able to create or save local users too. Tried to troubleshoot. Moved on.
• OpenFiler. Could not join Samba 4 domain. Could not add hard drive previously used by FreeNAS. User interface ran me in cycles. Shocked to see that the documentation had to be purchased. The web site is kind of empty. Moved on
• NexentaStore community edition. Does not use regular Samba. Had real trouble joining Samba4 domain. GUI has said it successfully joined it but I could not see the users. Invested lot of time troubleshooting, following all of the books on OpenSolaris/CIFS and Nexenta. Gave up.
  

Round 2. Integrating with Windows 2003 Active Directory

• Windows 7 client has no issues joining 2003 AD
  
• NexentaStore joined domain seamlessly. I have created local users and mapped them to the AD users. Web GUI wasn't clear on how to set individual permissions for the user's home directories, so I went to the command line and used the old good chmod. This part works now.
• FreeNAS joined domain, but dynamic DNS update did not happen. I have updated DNS manually. There was no need (or means) to map AD users to UNIX users. AD users were able to see the shares (as soon as I cared to synchronize time between AD server and FreeNAS server)