I want to allow my roommates access to my video and music shares, but don't want them digging around in my private files and backups. I've read the un-official unraid manual, but I'm not sure if Unraid will allow what I'm looking for. Right now the server is sitting in my Windows workgroup. I would like to allow access to my roomates but only to certain shares. While I want my 3 computers to have access to all of the files/shares.

You can restrict access by user, not by computer.  Look at the Users section and the Valid/Invalid users section of the share settings.

 

For some examples, take a look at the User and share security section of the configuration tutorial.

 

Also of note, if you create a user that has the same username and password as your Windows username on your machine, you won't get prompted for a password when you access shares.

Like what Spectrum quoted, user accounts are the way around this, to place access rights on a per-share setup. You could, have your movies grouped in one share, and leave this share for movies to be read access to all users (not requiring a user account), and if you've grouped other disks for private data, create a user account and set the permissions for this share, so only a specific user account locally created on your unRAID can access this share. If a share access permissions assigned to it locally, Windows will prompt you for a user name and password, simply enter the credentials and it'll validate your access.

 

Cheers

 

You can restrict access by user, not by computer.  Look at the Users section and the Valid/Invalid users section of the share settings.

 

For some examples, take a look at the User and share security section of the configuration tutorial.

 

Also of note, if you create a user that has the same username and password as your Windows username on your machine, you won't get prompted for a password when you access shares.

Also of note, if you create a user that has the same username and password as your Windows username on your machine, you won't get prompted for a password when you access shares.

 

You can also user a usermap.txt file to map Windows users to Linux users if the Window user names do not match the Linux user names.  This is necesary if your Windows users contain special characters (like the space character) not allowed in Linux user names.  Or if you just wanted to map your Windows logon to the Linux "root" user.

 

See THIS POST for information on custom Samba shares and on the usermap.txt file.

The one thing I did, I have Movies, Music, etc, all shared as normal. Then a couple that are for me only, my data, I shared as hidden. Then I just manually map it on my Win7 system. Anyone browsing the network, won't see the share...