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I am planning a switch away from MS Volume Licensing to save us about $450 per year per person. I have time to test and setup XEN on a clean local server and planning an Ubuntu VM for the file share and user permissions against it.

All connecting users will be Windows or OSX clients connecting to the shares which were previously Active Directory permission based. We are not going to have AD or domain after the switch.

I am looking for any instructions, tips or recommendations about attaching a VHD that is about 1.5TB NTFS that was previously passed through to a Windows 2008R2 VM.

Concerns/requirements: file path lengths (deep sub-folders), compatibility for read/write, ignoring old permissions, applying new user permissions on top level/recursive down folders. I'd prefer to not extract the VHD first and then load into a new file-system, but if there are many pro's to this I will do it.

Steve Seeger
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Dealing with the permissions is the only source of worry and can be quite challenging to manage without Active Directory or a comparable system.

Note that Samba 4 is compatible with all features of Active Directory, as mentioned in their official mailing list.

Julie Pelletier
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  • So the NTFS partition will just mount up and function as expected, the old active directory permissions are ignored? – Steve Seeger Jul 08 '16 at 18:40
  • You will obviously need to set up Samba to replicate your current Active Directory, which is not magically done and depending on your organization could possibly cost more in specialized labor than the license costs you but you could still save on the long run. – Julie Pelletier Jul 08 '16 at 18:44
  • Samba AD support is very interesting. We will be reinstalling Windows with retail licenses and local accounts as required to move away from volume licensing. Stopped using roaming profiles a long time ago and group policy we only used for drive mapping which can be done in 30 seconds manually once. If I have time it could be interesting though regardless... the simple samba share with new user accounts is most likely what I'll do. Thanks! – Steve Seeger Jul 08 '16 at 18:49