I have a client who needed to get a new file server for their office location.

Deciding that Windows was just not going to do the job for various reasons, I used a great open source solution FreeNAS to get the job done.

Everything was going great until OS X got involved.

5 Users in the office are Mac users, which typically is no problem and actually way less of a support issue.

This time, however, things were not going well.  My Mac users were creating folders and files on the server in shares set with permissions for all authenticated users, but the folders being created on the Macs were not writable to other users.

I double checked the user accounts and the permissions in FreeNAS to no avail.

After researching Samba parameters for the better part of an hour I came across something that seemed interesting.

A Samba configuration setting of  “unix extensions = no” seems to ignore the permissions OS X is overriding on the server when it is creating files and folders. By setting this variable in the smb.conf file in the global settings section, folders created by OS X users were writable by the Windows users.

So if you are planning on using a Unix/Linux file server in a mixed client environment, make sure to set “unix extensions = no” in the global section of smb.conf and restart Samba.

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