samba – Grace Abundant

WARNING: THIS POST ASSUMES SOME PROGRAMMING KNOWLEDGE, as you will have to tweak it to your own setup. If you aren’t able to generally figure out what is going on in this post, you shouldn’t try it. I take no responsibility to damage caused to your system! I wrote this post in a rush, so I may miss out basic steps.

In an attempt to conserve as much electricity as I can, I turn off my FreeNAS server whenever it’s not being used. Unfortunately, this was quite a tedious task to do manually. So, I used some scripting to automatically turn it on and off. The scripting for auto shutdown is done on the FreeNAS server, while auto wake up is done client-side.

Auto Shutdown

Using a cronjob, the FreeNAS server monitors a preset list of computers (via IP addresses). Once all the computers are off (i.e. no longer reachable on the network), it’ll turn itself off.

1) Create a file named shutdown.py with the following code: shutdown.py

2) Edit the IP addresses section with whichever computers you want to monitor in your network, e.g.:

###### IP addresses ##### # IP addresses go underneath this line, one on each line in the format: ip_list.append('x.x.x.x') ip_list.append('192.168.1.2') ip_list.append('192.168.1.3') ###### End IP addresses

3) Place the file somewhere on your server, and make sure it’s executable. You can make a file executable by SSH’ing into the FreeNAS server, and entering the command chmod +x /mnt/path/to/shutdown.py, changing /mnt/path/to/ to the directory that shutdown.py is in.

4) Create a cronjob to run the file. You can do this via the Web UI. For example, the following settings run the script every 5 minutes from 12am-5am. You can adjust this to your own liking.

Automatically Wake Up

Whenever any of the computers in the house are turned on, they send a Wake-on-LAN signal to the FreeNAS server and automatically mount the shares.

Mac OS

Python is required to run this script! Basically, these scripts will check every 3 minutes that the FreeNAS server is on, and that the network shares are mounted. If not, it will attempt to turn on the FreeNAS server (by sending WakeOnLAN) and mounting afp shares. Please feel free to edit the scripts as you see fit, or change the directories they are in, of course making the necessary changes.

1) Create the file com.hoongern.nasmounter.plist in /Users/<your username>/Library/LaunchAgents

2) Create the file nas.py in /Library/Scripts/. YOU HAVE TO EDIT the configuration in the script as required:

3) Restart your Mac. If I remember, launchctl should find the new task. You can run launchctl list and check if com.hoongern.nasmounter is listed. If it’s not, I can’t actually remember what to do. I don’t actually use Mac OS, you see…

Windows

To be honest, I haven’t written a script for Windows. Not that it should be hard at all – just use a similar python script, the Task Scheduler, and the “net use” command to mount Samba shares. If there’s enough interest, I can write it up and post it here – let me know!

Linux

Again, no script yet. Shouldn’t be difficult with a similar python script, cronjob, and the “mount” command to mount Samba/NFS shares.

In many networks these days, you’ll probably have more than just Windows or Mac OS clients. If you regularly exchange data between Mac OS and Windows/Linux using a flash drive and have hidden files enabled, you may notice a bunch of .DS_Store folders and other various files beginning with a dot. Personally, I find it somewhat annoying that Mac OS litters whole file systems with these files (In the same way, I also hate those thumbs.db files Windows generates)

In a unified file server which serves multiple operating systems, we ideally want each client to have a good experience browsing for files. We don’t want Windows users to be bogged down in a mess of files they have no clue about, and we don’t want them accidentally deleting files which may be important to the Mac OS experience.

There are no adjustments which need to be made on your AFP shares, since only Mac OS clients access those shares and know what to do with these files. However, these files should be hidden on CIFS shares. Here’s how you do it in FreeNAS 8 (The solution applies to anyone using CIFS, not just in FreeNAS):

1. Navigate to your CIFS share and press edit

2. Find “Auxilary Parameters at the bottom”

3. Enter the following text in the box

veto files = /Temporary Items/.DS_Store/.AppleDB/.TemporaryItems/.AppleDouble/.bin/.AppleDesktop/Network Trash Folder/.Spotlight/.Trashes/.fseventd/
delete veto files = yes
hide dot files = yes

Vetoing a file will render it completely invisible to anyone accessing the share. It differs from hidden files in that hidden files are hidden on the client side, but vetoed files are hidden on the server side even before the list of files is sent to the client.

The first line veto files specifies a list of file names to veto, each entry separated by a ‘/’, and you can also use wildcards (‘*’ and ‘?’) to specify multiple files with a single pattern.

“delete veto files” allows CIFS to delete any vetoed files within a directory when that said directory is deleted. If this is not set to ‘yes’, deleting a directory could fail.

“hide dot files” is optional, but simply sets all files beginning with a dot (which are hidden files in Mac OS and Linux) with a hidden flag.

4. Restart CIFS from your Services tab

If all is well, browsing your shares from all computers should now be a pleasant experience!

If you’re ever in doubt, or if you want to find out what other options can be entered, do check out the smb.conf documentation.

Tag: samba

Automatic Shutdown/Wake Up on FreeNAS