Zombie thread but it wasn't answered and I haven't found a current one that does yet. Anyway its first page on google results so here goes. braaaaaains!
This is unfortunately incorrect, at least in 2018 it is. A Microsoft Account is not an email account. It is a Microsoft Account that is registered to your device and software licenses (for MS products), your Store account, your Skype acct and it links your user profile experience across Windows machines. That is why every time you log in with your MS account on a new PC, you have to authorize that by multi-factor auth and lo and behold you have the same desktop image and other stuff. You can and should use your MS account with your unRAID shares because it's The Right Way and it's easy. But there is no integration to MS directly; you will have to update your password on unRAID when you change it with MS. This is actually how it's done on every NAS on the market that I've seen, because its been supported by Samba for years.
Unfortunately the GUI on unRAID has not caught up with the times. You can use your Microsoft Account with unRAID; you just need to know how to edit a few config files, and you need to restart samba (i.e. stop/start the array).
- In the GUI, create a user with the short name for your account. e.g. in my case I called the account 'dude'. Set a password for dude that matches your MS account. This will create a unix account and a matching samba account
- edit /etc/passwd (and /boot/config/passwd probably - I did) and change "dude" to "
[email protected]" to match your MS acct
- edit /etc/shadow (and /boot/config/shadow) likewise
- edit /boot/config/smbpasswd as well, to change the unix username to your MS account
Now when you restart the array its going to restart samba. You can probably bounce samba manually; I've not tried to see if unRAID handles that gracefully yet. Someone else might chime in the confirm. Once samba is restarted, the new account is enabled.
Okay now on the client machine you are connecting from, I'm assuming that you are logging in with a standard Microsoft Account. You should have no drives mapped (especially with credentials saved) and you can always restart the Workstation service to clear any open sessions to the server. Once you've done this, if you navigate to the unRAID server in your Windows Explorer network browser, it should not prompt you for credentials ASSUMING that you configured basic permissions for the user account to access your shares.
This works fine because its TOTALLY SUPPORTED BY SAMBA and standard on almost every NAS product I've seen but unRAID. I'm just going to push a feature request to add the ability for the GUI and the supporting scripts to eat a proper email address for a MS account.
BTW the form of a MS account in SMB protocol is MicrosoftAccount\
[email protected]
If the target was a windows box, it would need to have that MS account created locally and have been logged in once before. Samba is not so picky because it has SAVED the password that you gave it. The difference is that real Windows 8 or 10 host knows how to ask Microsoft if the credentials are valid (and it caches it for a time, which you could look up - I've forgotten).
I find it hilarious when people say oh this is not standard or supported when it's a Microsoft protocol so what they say and do is the standard.
Cheers from your friendly neighborhood MCSE.