Tom, the User Shares in 3.0 is really neat, and it will help a lot of people to use UnRaid.

 

I do have one request, I would like to see a single virtual share exported from Tower that would expose all of the User Shares, but none of the Disk Shares.

 

The reason, I like to map everything on UnRaid to a single drive (M:) on Windows workstations. As it is, you can not map the tower (\\Tower), but rather have to map each of the top-level shares (\\Towr\Movies, \\Tower\Music, \\Tower\Pictures, etc).

 

I'd like the top level folder to be user nameable, I would name it "Media" in my case, so then I would map M: to \\Tower\Media, and within it, I would see:

Movies

Music

Pictures

HD Movies

 

But nothing else, no Disk1, disk 2, etc.

 

I hope this makes sense, let me elaborate a little more on what I was previously doing with Unraid to simulate this. I was using symbolic links to have everything "appear" on disk 1, so roughly my strructure was:

 

Tower

  Music (180GB natively on Disk 1)

  Pictures (20GB natively on Disk 1)

  eBooks (20GB natively on Disk 1)

  Movies (symlink to \\Tower\Disk 2)

      Kids (a symlink in /mnt/disk2/Movies to /mnt/disk3)

      HD Movies 1 (a symlink in /mnt/disk2/Movies to /mnt/disk4)

      HD Movies 2 (a symlink in /mnt/disk2/Movies to /mnt/disk5)

      HD Movies 3 (a symlink in /mnt/disk2/Movies to /mnt/disk6)

      HD Movies 4 (a symlink in /mnt/disk2/Movies to /mnt/disk7)

      HD Movies 5 (a symlink in /mnt/disk2/Movies to /mnt/disk8)

 

I would then map M: to \\Tower\disk1 and I got close to what I was looking for (you'll note all of the seperate HD Movies folders, yuck)

 

So, ideally, with User Shares, which I perver as they are more straightforward than the symlink method, I would have one "Uber" User share that contained all of the User Share Folders, but none of the disk share folders, that I coulkd name and map, in my case M: (\\Tower\Media).

 

Within it, I would see:

 

Media

  Music

  Pictures

  eBooks

  Movies

      Kids

      HD Movies (spread across 5 disks)

 

I would then be in Unraid nirvana, as I would export this uber share as read-only, and manage via hidden disk shares.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

 

Also, FYI, on a vista client there appears to be an empty \\Tower\Printers share. Any idea on what's casuing that?

You can already do exactly what you want plus more 

 

Say you have this structure:

 

disk1/Movies/..

disk1/Photos/..

disk1/Backup/..

disk2/Movies/..

disk2/Music/..

disk3/Movies/..

 

As you know, User Shares will be set up like this:

 

Movies

Photos

Backup

Music

 

But you want to combine the media, so go to each disk where you have media, create a "Media" top level directory, and then move the Movies, Music, Photos, etc. directories under Media, ie:

 

disk1/Media/Movies/..

disk1/Media/Photos/..

disk1/Backup/..

disk2/Media/Movies/..

disk2/Media/Music/..

disk3/Media/Movies/..

 

Now you'll get these User Shares:

 

Media

Backup

 

Under Media you'll see:

Media/Movies/..

Media/Music/..

Media/Photos/..

 

Nirvana?!

 

BTW, plan to add separate export controls on each User Share, so in above example, can make 'Media' readonly and 'Backup' hidden if you want - eventually also add password protection, etc.

 

Note: when I say "move" the directories, just use Windows explorer and drag them... it's very fast.

Also, FYI, on a vista client there appears to be an empty \\Tower\Printers share. Any idea on what's casuing that?

 

Very interesting, the Samba config file is set up to not export any Printer stuff... I'll look into this, but I don't have a Vista machine.

You can already do exactly what you want plus more 

I hate it when I miss the obvious!

 

Should work just fine for me, I'm off moving everything down another level again.

 

I'll give it a whirl for a while and let you know.

Tom, I doble checked, on both of my Vista RC1 boxes there is a "Printers" folder (empty) in \\Tower

 

Both my XP SP2 box do not have this folder.

Also, a little strange is now that I moved everything into a Media Folder on the root of each drive as you suggested, and mapped M: = \\Tower\Media, Windows reports Drive M as 49.8MB free of 113MB (note, MB, not GB).

 

Wierd, where's this coming from? With sizes like that I have to assume the flash.

 

It's not important though (neither is the Printers thing), I don't really care what Windows thinks 

It reporting the size of the internal ram disk since that's where the user share is mounted... one of the glitches to be fixed with User Shares...

Hrm, for some reason I thought it would only export shares for directories that were common across multiple disks. When I've enabled this I now get a new share for EVERY folder off of the root. That's ALOT of shares since I hadn't ever planned on this.

 

Tom, it appears that what you're doing is scanning for directories off of the root and then exporting them. Would it be possible to modify that exported list by hand? Or perhaps as an option only share folders out that exist on multiple drives? I'm not sure that anyone besides myself would want that so I'll understand if that's not doable.

Hrm, for some reason I thought it would only export shares for directories that were common across multiple disks. When I've enabled this I now get a new share for EVERY folder off of the root. That's ALOT of shares since I hadn't ever planned on this.

 

Tom, it appears that what you're doing is scanning for directories off of the root and then exporting them. Would it be possible to modify that exported list by hand? Or perhaps as an option only share folders out that exist on multiple drives? I'm not sure that anyone besides myself would want that so I'll understand if that's not doable.

 

Hmm, problems with that.  I'm trying to keep everything as automatic as possible (automatic = simple).  Now that you know how the User Shares work, it should be relatively painless to set up a good organization.

User Shares?  All I can say is "Wow!"

 

I had just added another drive to finally max out my server, and I figured I would have to do some kind of inefficient search on AVS or here to find that command that Joe L. or somebody posted about making symlinks (No, I never write down useful information like that on the whiteboard...only my grocery list from about a year ago.)  But this makes it automatic.  And, yes, automatic does equal simple.

 

Thanks, Tom!

Yeah, I second that. User Shares are really growing on me.

 

The combination of exporting the user shares read-only (so the kiddies don't blow-away everything), and exporting the Disk Shares read/write, hidden (so I can manage via disk1, disk2, etc, but only if I know they are there) is killer.

 

Read/write performance, and I'm good to go - for a long time.

User Shares?  All I can say is "Wow!"

 

I had just added another drive to finally max out my server, and I figured I would have to do some kind of inefficient search on AVS or here to find that command that Joe L. or somebody posted about making symlinks (No, I never write down useful information like that on the whiteboard...only my grocery list from about a year ago.)  But this makes it automatic.  And, yes, automatic does equal simple.

 

Thanks, Tom!

Perhaps Tom... you could keep it simple, as it is, and by default export all the top level folders.  And, for us more  experienced users, look for a file on the flash drive named "DoNotShare" or something like that.  It file would be a simple text file that would include a list of the folders we  do not want to to export as shared drives.

 

So, by default it works as you have today, but if the "DoNotShare" file exists and the name of the folder is in the "DoNotShare" list, it is not.  Inexperienced users have the functionality as they do today, experienced users can control exactly what is exported.

 

Thinking  more about this, it would be great eventually to have a page on the user interface with a checkbox alongside  of each top-level folder that when checked would exclude a folder from being shared.  Then, we can enable folders and disable them as needed.  (The "backup" folder might only be exported when doing backups, etc)

 

Joe L.

...

Thinking  more about this, it would be great eventually to have a page on the user interface with a checkbox alongside  of each top-level folder that when checked would exclude a folder from being shared.  Then, we can enable folders and disable them as needed.  (The "backup" folder might only be exported when doing backups, etc)

 

Joe L.

 

The plan is to implement the drop-down box selections for each User Share - this may be available in -beta2 release shortly.