Nice catch there. It looks like the most recent edits on the 24.04 version of that tutorial didn’t get ported forward to the nightly docs (I’ll work on fixing that today), but yes SMB Home Shares should be considered a legacy feature that are not recommended for new deployments.
To answer the initial question, no AD is not a requirement in SCALE. I’m not sure why the original author of that tutorial presented it as such, but I’ll look at softening that recommendation as well.
We’ll be adding direct documentation on alternate methods of configuring something like Home Shares in the near future, but in the meantime, some things to consider:
- Do you actually need individual users to have direct access to the NAS? From a security perspective it may be better to have a single share configured on the NAS and then handle provisioning individual user directories on the client OS. OSes generally have performance expectations for homedirs that network storage can’t easily fulfil.
- If you really want to create individual shared directories on the NAS, you can create a single SMB share and configure the ACL so that users inherit permissions on individual directories they create on the share to give them write access and restrict read access from everyone but the administrator. Or,
- Create an SMB share using the Private SMB datasets and shares preset that can create per-user datasets under the umbrella of a single share. So if you go to
\\server\backupsand your username is “bob” it will put the share’s path as “/mnt/tank/backups/bob”, but if you’re “larry” you will get “/mnt/tank/backups/larry”