I'm new to Unraid having bought my license today after a month's trial and I'm very impressed.

 

I'm looking to consolidate two separate NAS devices into one single Unraid host. However, they are quite distinct beasts: one being a media server hosting Sonarr, Radarr, music etc. and the other an office server hosting document shares, email server and pbx. I want to retain the existing server names for compatibility and so that media shares are not visible on the office server and vice versa. 

 

Plan A is to run a separate Samba instance in a Docker container using a custom eth0 network to publish and access the office shares. This appears to achieve exactly what I want with minimal overhead, but being unfamiliar with the workings of Unraid I am starting to worry that by using a separate instance of Samba I am somehow circumventing its file system and that I'll start having problems later. Is this the case or am I worrying about nothing?

 

Plan B is to create a separate VM running the office server.

 

Any advice gratefully received

You are overthinking this. Just configure each user share to have the access needed. 

You're probably right, but can you humour me and answer the question as to whether using another Samba instance would bypass the integrity of the Unraid system?

 

Thanks.

It won't bypass the integrity, but i wonder how you plan to run the second instance. As a VM perhaps? or as a docker container with its own IP? I ask this as you can't run a second Samba instance due to conflict with the service ports (only one process can listen on a port)

I have it running in a docker container using a separate IP (custom network on br0). It seems to be working very well - exactly what I wanted and without the overhead of a VM. It also reads the Samba user and passwords from the smbpasswd file on the flash drive which is very pleasing. Thanks for the confirmation about the integrity - reading in this forum that moving (mv) files from the command line could cause unexpected results made me nervous.

6 minutes ago, Torrox said:

moving (mv) files from the command line could cause unexpected results

Moving or copying files using any method could cause unexpected results if you mix user shares and disks.

 

Moving can also cause unexpected results when both source and destination are user shares.

 

See this post for an explanation of both scenarios: