Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users

Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.
Full details are available in this iXsystems Technical Note about LDAP channel binding and LDAP signing.  
Users not using Active Directory are unaffected by these Microsoft updates and therefore can update their FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems at their leisure.
SMB Sharing on FreeNAS and TrueNAS
FreeNAS and TrueNAS are used to provide SMB shares in over 80% of deployments. Windows, Mac, and now Linux clients use SMB to share files. In many cases, SMB3 is preferred to NFSv3 and includes some file integrity advantages because the client behavior is well defined. SMB clients gain the advantages of the highly robust OpenZFS file system and all the replication and administration tools that FreeNAS and TrueNAS provide.
SMB3 is usually deployed in organizations with Active Directory to manage user authentication and permissions. All Windows Servers and FreeNAS/TrueNAS units can be configured to use the same security control.

FreeNAS and TrueNAS Release 11.3
The good news is that version 11.3 includes many improvements to SMB and Active Directory support beyond the compatibility with the new Microsoft security patches: 

• The methods of communicating with the Active Directory Domain Controller now use strong authentication. The strong authentication methods are either SSL-encrypted transport or signed sasl_gssapi bind (Kerberos). This is the additional feature needed to avoid disruption with the change in security defaults.
• Setup wizards for SMB and Active Directory have been added. The user feedback on ease of deployment has been excellent.
• SMB and OpenZFS snapshots have been better integrated. Now ZFS snapshots are automatically visible to clients’ systems as Shadow Copies with all the previous versions of files. A file from an old snapshot can be copied and restored to a current share without any help from a storage administrator.  More impressively, only snapshots with file changes are visible to the client so it’s much easier to find the right snapshot.
• Tools and best practices have been added to improve the ability to share the same files with NFS and SMB clients. NFSv3 has some weaknesses where clients can be configured to ignore network locking, but as long as best practices are followed, mixed protocol shares can be safely operated.
• ACL manager has been added to provide an easy-to-use web UI to set permissions on an SMB share. This greatly simplifies SMB setup and reduces the setup time.
• ZFS Replication between SMB datasets to a backup system has been greatly improved. The speed of replication on high bandwidth links has been increased by 8X to over 10Gbit/s (5 TB per hour). For large datasets, these replication tasks now support a suspend and resume model that can withstand a network outage. This is probably the most efficient SMB share replication available.
• ZFS user quotas are now exposed as NT quotas to SMB clients. Windows users can manage these quotas using File Explorer, and Linux and FreeBSD users can use the smbcquotas utility for quota management.

Please contact us if we can help you with your next SMB server deployments.