Write Access Issues

[jgrahamiii]

I'm new to the ReadyNAS scene. We had several WinXP machines accessing a single common drive in another PC. After I installed a ReadyNAS Duo v2 (using Local User for security) using firmware 5.3.5, I created a share called DATA. I did not change any of the default settings. Everyone has read/write access and I did not change anything regarding automatically setting the permissions on new files. I then used my PC to copy all the files from the common hard drive to the ReadNAS. It was all fine until another user tried to access a file that was contained in subfolder of the main share.

They could see it just fine, and could read it, but they could only open in read only mode. They could not write to the subfolder at all. They could write to the main share, but not any directory below unless they created it. The read-only box in the folder properties was neither checked nor unchecked, but was a green box. Changes did not hold. Eventually, I used Windows from my PC to reset all permissions to full control for "Everyone" for the main share and all children below and everything seemed to work fine. I also realized that I needed to check "automatic Permissions" and then set all the file and folder creation options to Read/Write in Dashboard for the share, so I'd hoped this would not happen again. We were fine for most of the day. Then I rebooted the ReadyNAS.

During the short period before I realized this was a permissions problem, I tried to create a user account on the system for one of our people. I planned on doing this for everyone eventually for better security, but only after things were working fine. At any rate, I created the one user, but still only checked off "read/write" for everyone for that share. I DID NOT check off Read only for this user. Their username and password matched their windows credentials. After the reboot of the ReadyNAS, I turned on this person's machine and had her log in, and, lo and behold, she was back to having Read Only access. However, now, she was the only one. Everyone else had read/write, just not her. So I tried deleting her account. That was even worse. Now she could not even access the ReadyNAS. It appears that the user account was not deleted on the ReadyNAS, it was merely deactivated. She was treated as an interloper and not given anonymous or everyone access. I reinstalled her user account on the ReadyNAS and she was back to Read Only.

Finally solved it by hitting the "reset permissions" on the Dashboard screen under files and folders for that share. After that she was fine.

But now I'm scared to reboot again, and I'm scared to create more users. There's too much going on under the hood I don't understand. I certainly don't want to reset permissions every time I reboot. And I don;t want to create users if they will have problems.

Thanks for any help in telling me that I stumbled on to the solution or directing me toward something more permanent. Also, any guidance on how to delete a user (maybe using SSH) rather than deactivating them would be great too.

I see why some people get very frustrated with the ReadyNAS. It all seemed so easy at the start, but these types of problems interfere with work even though it should have been straight forward. Thanks - John

[mdgm]

Thankyou very much for reporting this jgrahamiii

I was able to reproduce this issue.

Before deleting the user first make sure that the user is not connected to the NAS:
You should also make sure that active connections to the NAS are deleted. Go to Start > Run > cmd, and type "net use".

The user is deleted when you delete it via the Dashboard but not from the samba password database (used for the SMB/CIFS protocol). So before deleting a user "joe" via the Dashboard you would do:

Code: Select all

# smbpasswd -x joe


If you are not comfortable with SSH, support should be able to delete this for you.

Please open a tech support case at my.netgear.com reporting this issue to NetGear support and edit the thread title (i.e. subject of first post in this thread) to include your case number.

[jgrahamiii]

Thanks. I have enough familiarity with SSH that I can enter that one command. Right now, that user is back on and working fine since I reset the file permissions. I think I'll see how that goes for a while. When I have time and no one is here, I'll do another reboot and see if her access is cut off. May have just been a fluke as at the time I had never reset permissions via Dashboard, only via Windows. -John