Permissions across client OSes

[cvillers]

We are considering a TS-879U-RP and so far are impressed that it hits more or less everything we want out of a NAS. Primarily we will be storing home directories for around 30-50 simultaneous users for both Windows and Solaris, along with some other infrequently-accessed data. We are also adding some Macs into the mix, but probably will not store their home directories on the QNAP, so we could probably just export shares over SMB and call it a day.

Our primary concern before purchasing is cross-platform permissions. Our users are part of an Active Directory domain and we use Winbind on the Solaris box to authenticate there. We will likely be replacing that with BeyondTrust PowerBroker (formerly Likewise Identity, for those familiar with that) in the future.

Users access their home directories (\\fileserver\homes\cvillers) from Windows and sometimes map to personal devices, and we also expose the Solaris home directories as a mapped drive on the Windows clients using Samba on the Solaris host (\\solarisbox\cvillers). Windows credentials get passed through automatically to Samba and the mounting is transparent. We plan on restructuring the home directories in the manner of \\qnap\homes\cvillers\windows, qnap:/homes/cvillers/unix, etc. We would therefore be mounting Solaris home directories over NFS. So the concerns we have are related to permissions, ACLs, and such being consistently applied to users no matter which OS they are accessing it from:

• Will the QNAP be able to recognize and authenticate users on both Windows and Solaris clients?
  
• How would UIDs and GIDs be managed?
  
• Can it read them from Active Directory? The Services for Unix pack adds UID and GID fields.
  
• PowerBroker has a feature that generates identical IDs across machines by hashing the account SID, which may be useful - should we let Solaris boxes create new home directories so they can get the right IDs?