[TrueNAS SCALE v.24.10.1] Quick and easy NFS share export for Proxmox users

Straight to the point, considerations at the end.

  1. Create a new user in Credentials:

    Username of your choice
    Disable password
    Create New Primary Group
    Home Directory: /nonexistent
    Home Directory Permissions: User (is this even relevant?)
    Create Home Directory [ ]
    SMB User [ ]

  2. Add a new NFS share:

    Path: select the dataset you want to share
    └ Advanced Options
    Mapall User: use the user you created before
    Mapall Group: use the group automatically created before
    Hosts → Add → Authorized Hosts and IP addresses: write here Proxmox server’s IP or hostname if you want to be sure no other machine can access this share

  3. Datasets

    Select the dataset connected to the NFS share
    └ Scroll down the “Details” pane on the right until you see the “Permissions” section
    └ Edit
    User: select the user you created
    Group: select the related group
    Apply Group
    Apply permissions recursively
    Access Mode: the default selections should be fine as is

And that’s it.
Now, the reason why I struggled (a LOT) to make it work properly was because of a misunderstanding; a misunderstanding that TrueNAS’ documentation, evidently written with professionals in mind, could not clear.
Forum threads, on the other hand, (not just on TrueNAS’) not always catch the attention of the more knowledgeable users, which can lead to incomplete, erroneous or no replies at all. And that was all my googling skills could yield.

A little recap of my personal odissey as a newb.
I had done more or less everything right up to “New NFS share”, but I was completely oblivious of the Permissions section in the dataset details; more precisely, I had no idea it was pertinent to a NFS share.
The result was “Error 500” on Proxmox’s side.
On top of that, none of the tens of forum threads I perused, let alone the one I started myself, presented a correct and in-depth explanation of what was going wrong and how to fix it. The widespread agreement seemed to be that setting Mapall User/Group to “root/wheel” or “root/root” was the only way to make it work; unacceptable, no less.

Lucky me, I stumbled on a saint of a Discord user who displayed an inexhaustible amount of patience and helped me out of the swamp.

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Was the issue the default 755 permissions?
Which documentation were you following?

I don’t know what the 755 issue is, so I guess it was not that.

As I’ve written, the problem was rooted in my misunderstanding of the differences between the share permissions and the dataset permissions.
What I was missing were the dataset permissions for the user I wanted to squash the clients to.

TrueNAS was working as intended, the problem was me! ^^’

Thank you for your reply.

Thank you for sharing this!

However, I think 1 thing may be missing? In the section for the datasets, shouldn’t the option “Apply User” also be ticked? Otherwise changing the user field will have no effect.

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Yessss!!!
Of course, I just forgot to include that option in the scheme. ^^’

Unfortunately, it seems I can’t edit it anymore. =0

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