Samba, getent & Time Machine on ZFS system

Hello,

After some struggles with configuring Time Machine on my FreeBSD Samba server (also with Active Directory), I have finally arrived at a stable solution. There are three things that I have discovered:
  1. I had issues with getent not resolving the names of users on my active directory server. All the settings were correct. After the initial setup, getent would resolve the names. Then day-by-day, it would loose one name after the other. After some fiddling, I focussed on nmbd. I noticed it was running, but it really has no purpose on a modern system. Having the "disable netbios = yes" in smb4.conf did nothing regarding the service. Instead I put "nmbd_enable = "NO"" in the rc.conf file. This disabled nmbd without any negative effects on the network.
  2. With nmbd disabled, I still had some issues with getent loosing names. Oddly, not having "disable netbios = yes" in smb4.conf has resolved the issue. This seems strange but it is what it is. With nmbd disabled in rc.conf and not disabling netbios in smb4.conf, the getent calls work consistently and I don't loose users.
  3. There is an issue with using the "fruit:time machine max size" in smb4.conf. I have found that with this in my smb4.conf, the Time Machine share is completely frozen/locked. On my Mac computers, this also freezes the other shares on the Samba server but not on my Win10 machines. This took me longer to find out than it should since I had this setting enabled from the get-go and thought it was another issue.
All my shares on the Samba server work as expected including having iTunes and Time Machine shares on them and everything authenticating through my Active Directory server(s) including my firewall. My VPN sessions are also authenticated through my firewall via Active Directory.

My tinkering continues.
 
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