Centrally manage FreeNAS permissions?

I'm unfamiliar with how FreeNAS works. What protocol are the OS X clients using? AFP? SMB/CIFS? NFS? Something special?

AFP for the OS X clients, SMB for the Windows clients, both clients operating on the same underlying data shares.

When I did something along these lines, I used SMB on the OS X clients as sbutler suggested on a painfully bizarre AD / Linux mongrel of an authentication system/file storage network. I still had a couple of cron jobs that did some chmod work on a couple of client shares that would not play well with others, so you're not too far off the path by my experience. Cron makes the world work.

Alright, does anyone have advice on a more formal work-around for the cron approach? If this is a common issue surely someone's come up with a bash script that: Loops through top-level directories Takes the permissions, user and group settings for the directory Applies those permissions recursively to the sub-directories and files This would at least simplify the process so that I could easily add top-level directories without adding new cron jobs and new commands. Either that, or surely I'm missing something about how to set up inherited permissions on Unix filesystems?

Use NFS. You can (in theory, anyway) set up an Open Directory server that can work with your AD domain for authentication. This will centralize your UID/GID distribution. NFS uses POSIX permissions, and things work mostly as you'd expect. The main problem I have found is that sometimes OSX understands nested groups, and other times it just doesn't, so try to avoid that if you can. You'll have a bitch of a time getting all your UID/GIDs matched up and fixing the home directory permissions on the client machines. It is doable though.

You can (in theory, anyway) set up an Open Directory server that can work with your AD domain for authentication. I don't have an AD domain. User authentication was via the FreeNAS box's own users and groups. I need to preserve the ability for both OS X and Windows clients to connect, as well as remote connections via SCP. Are you saying I need to get the local client UID/GIDs to match the ones on the server?

Are you saying I need to get the local client UID/GIDs to match the ones on the server? Yeah, you life will be much easier if you do. A directory server can simplify this, but might be overkill if you have like 4 machines and users.

We're not very large, but I don't want to redirect the entire home directory to NFS, and I still want to offer share access to Windows clients, and via SCP. I'd just like the username with which you connect to the share, through whatever means, to dictate the user and group that's associated with new files created via that connection. This seems like a simple concept. Surely I'm not alone in wanting this.

to make files/directories inherit the parent's ownership, you need to enable the sgid (set group id) bit on the parent directories. http://www.library.yale.edu/wsg/docs/permissions/sgid.htm, or check the chmod manpage. depending how client machines access the share you may need to do this directly on the NAS rather than from a connected client.