New user here!

I've brought in a 12-drive zfs pool from TrueNAS. For the most par, everything is okay. That said, of the two shares, one I can take ownership of and set permissions. I can see it on SMB and all is good. The other, however, I can set ownership on. But permissions keep resetting to read-only, for the owner only. And even then, it won't mount on Samba. My Mac keeps saying 'the original items can't be found'.

And now it gets weirder... I created a 3rd share and moved a directory, from the 'bugged' share, to it. I can mount the share in Samba and see the dir and all the contents. I can ALSO now mount the 'bugged' share and see ONLY that directory in it. So it's like it moved but it didn't. Unless mv is actually cp, I don't understand. Ultimately, I'd like to torch the 'bugged' directory and just move on with my life. But there's about 20TB of data in it. And I'm afraid that if I'm seeing it in both shares, that deleting it in the 'bugged' share may also delete it in the new 3rd share.

Tools-New Permissions. That will set owner and permissions as they need to be. Don't attempt to use mac or windows to change these.

Set SMB access to the share in the settings for the share, public, secure, private.

Thanks. Yeah, I found New Permissions and ran it last night. Totally forgot about chmod 777. Been a while since I've done any of this.

That finished and then I ran a mv command on a dir and went to bed. This morning, I got up and it looks like about 30% of the directory transferred, with the last folder (that's incomplete) showing the original permissions and root as the owner (all the rest are me). Idk if root takes ownership, while copying and then sets it back, once complete... The other interesting thing is that with both shares mounted, as soon as I trigger the copy, I can see (but not access) it in the original share on my desktop. It just pops up. Very strange behavior.

Also, when I look at 'Shares', it appears to be both a place for Share Settings and the File Browser. It starts you at the shares. But you can go up and see /user and then just root. I noticed that everything in /user is set to me as the owner. But at the root level, all pools are owned by no one.

I fired up a Win10 pc and verified the Samba behavior on it as well. The 'trouble' share is visible on the network but refuses to mount. All of the other request credentials and work as expected.

Better to use the built-in File Manager instead of the command line to move/copy. It will avoid some of these problems, and prevent you from possibly making the mistake of trying to work with user shares and disks together.

Appreciate that. I've been using it exclusively (just using the shorthand for brevity)... I skimmed the help on the cmd line but haven't gotten into it yet.

Yeah, this is wild. After reading up, it seems that Unraid prefers owner to be 'nobody' (issues that result from containers changing ownership). So I took the pool offline, stopped all services, reran the permissions script, brought the pool back up, restarted services and confirmed I have read/write on all shares. The problem persists. Finder reports 'The share does not exist on the server', even though it's clearly presenting itself to Finder. It's like it can see it, has no problem with my credentials but just can't mount it. And again, same behavior on Mac and PC. So maybe something in Samba?

One thought was that the /dir that has ~15TB of data has the same name as the new target Share. So I changed the name of the target Share and still nothing (just throwing stuff at the wall, at this point). Once the current mv job finishes up, I'm thinking about taking everything offline, changing the name of the bugged Share and seeing what happens. That one I don't like so much. But I am curious to know what's going on.

Edited November 24, 2025Nov 24 by Integr8d

20 minutes ago, Integr8d said:

Yeah, this is wild. After reading up, it seems that Unraid prefers owner to be 'nobody' (issues that result from containers changing ownership). So I took the pool offline, stopped all services, reran the permissions script, brought the pool back up, restarted services and confirmed I have read/write on all shares. The problem persists. Finder reports 'The share does not exist on the server', even though it's clearly presenting itself to Finder. It's like it can see it, has no problem with my credentials but just can't mount it. And again, same behavior on Mac and PC. So maybe something in Samba?

IF you want to begin understanding how Unraid handles share access, there is a whole thread about I have have been able to discover. The post below explains how things appear to work:

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/191221-some-musings-on-smb-and-samba-and-unraid-and-windows/#findComment-1561580

If you want even more information, read the entire thread. One thing not really covered is the user, nobody. This was a Linux contrivance to get around some messy permissions issues. Google if you want more information. But it was also found to have some security issues if I remember correctly but it remains there still because it allows certain things to just work. (In Unraid, guest users are mapped to 'nobody'.)

EDIT: many problems arise because Docker Container and VM's write directly to shares without using proper permissions and user credentials. They should be setup to use nobody as the user and the group of users!

Edited November 25, 2025Nov 25 by Frank1940

I’ll keep that in mind about ‘set to nobody’! Thank you.

Still leaves this issue in the dark. I’m going to guess it’s the SMB implementation. The share is called Homes. And that came from an old Synology NAS.

Currently, I can’t even get it to gracefully spin down and reboot. There’s still some minimal reading going on with the pool. But it’s clearly done with the mv job. That said, I’m looking at htop and the process is still alive. And I can’t kill it.

Honestly, I bought this b/c I thought the VM setup would be smoother than TrueNAS. But this has been a let down. And I’m not even to VM’s yet!!! lol

Well there you go. I hard reset the server, renamed the bugged share, restarted samba, and it mounts. So maybe there’s some bug with anything called ‘homes’.

15 minutes ago, Integr8d said:

Well there you go. I hard reset the server, renamed the bugged share, restarted samba, and it mounts. So maybe there’s some bug with anything called ‘homes’.

From the SHARES >>> 'Add Share' button:

Thanks for that. These were pre-existing shares. ‘Homes’ originally came from a Synology.

Maybe make a note to flag anything zpool imports that have blacklisted names.