NETGEAR 312, 104, 314 Basic User and Group Concepts, User and Group Account Limitations

ReadyNAS OS 6.0

Basic User and Group Concepts

Users are the people to whom you grant access to your storage system. If your company uses Windows Active Directory, you can use that to manage ReadyNAS users. Otherwise, when you want to allow someone to access your ReadyNAS system, you create a user account for that person. The ReadyNAS storage system administrator sets up user accounts and decides which folders and LUNs each user is permitted to access.

If your ReadyNAS storage system is used at home, you might create a user account for each member of the family, but allow only the parents to access financial data stored on your system. You might decide that all user accounts can access photos and music stored on the system. You can set the appropriate permissions for each user.

The ReadyNAS system administrator can set up groups to make it easier to manage large numbers of users. For example, if your ReadyNAS storage system is being used in a business, you might decide that every employee should have a user account. However, you might decide that only users in the accounting department can access information in the accounting shared folder, but that all users can access data stored in the company benefits shared folder. You can create a group for each department and place all users in the appropriate group or groups.

User and Group Account Limitations

You can create up to 8,192 user accounts and up to 8,192 group accounts on your ReadyNAS storage system. However, creating many accounts on your system can degrade its performance, so NETGEAR recommends that you create and maintain only those accounts you need, preferably fewer than 250.

When you add a user, a private home folder is created for that user. This private home folder is visible only to the user and the system administrator.

User and Group Management Modes

You can choose between two modes to manage user and group accounts on your ReadyNAS: Local Users mode and Active Directory mode. You configure either one or the other. If you decide to use Local Users mode.

•Local Users mode. This mode lets you manually manage user and group accounts on your ReadyNAS storage system using its local database.

•Active Directory mode. This mode requires an Active Directory database. If you use Active Directory mode, you do not use your ReadyNAS system to manage your users and groups. Instead, you manage them with your Active Directory database and the changes are transferred to your ReadyNAS system every 12 hours.

Users and Groups

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