Windows isn't able to link several shares on the same NAS device.
Windows isn't able to link several shares on the same NAS device.
Hi everyone. I mainly use Windows or gaming setups, and it’s okay for that, but really annoying with network configurations. My games are on my main server—Truenas Scale—with several copies using deduplication. I just installed an old machine running Truenas as the OS, and everything is working fine. I use it to keep backups of games and other files. Access and shares function perfectly on Linux. The games are stored on ISCSI block devices, so they’re only reachable from one machine at a time. My Windows 10 machine connects to ISCSI, but I need to back up games and data to the NAS I set up. It must map several network drives from the Windows PC to the backup server using different credentials. Currently it can only access one share at once. How can I make Windows allow multiple network drive mappings to the same NAS? It seems limited to just one at a time. It’s super frustrating. I only have a local account for a good reason and want to avoid the Microsoft Store completely.
Check if your shares have varying access rights. Use the hostname for one and the IP address for another, like \\hostname\share1 \\1.2.3.4\share2. You can't assign different permissions to multiple SMB shares under the same hostname. I also set up alternative static DNS entries as aliases for shares needing unique access. Changing hostnames prevents reuse of existing connections and allows distinct credentials. One share is read-only for all (guests), while another is read-write only with authorized users, such as \\MYNAS.local.lan\share \\BACKUP .local.lan\backup
Thank you for your message. The situation involves two shares on the same NAS using different credentials, which is causing issues. I’ve already tried similar steps you mentioned. I configured a DNS entry directing traffic to the NAS in my router. On the same Windows machine, a share now connects via that entry, and one uses the NAS IP address directly. I only use Windows for gaming, but I need basic network access for backups. Multiple shares are required because deduplication works differently on the NAS versus other devices. It seems like a Windows security feature is complicating things. This highlights how poor networking and security on Windows can be. As I said, Windows is mainly for games, while I’m more comfortable with Linux for other tasks.
Why exactly? Some shares use deduplicaion to save space - and money on hard drives. Some do not, and not practical to do it for both. It means using multiple shares. Please explain exactly how this is done on truenas scale?
Network sharing follows the idea that users connect to the NAS with specific permissions. Attempting to log in as multiple users from the same Windows account goes against its intended functionality. It’s unclear why you need credentials in this scenario. The question of centralizing games on iSCSI versus local NVME drives seems confusing. Are the Windows machines acting as virtual machines, and is this approach for deduplication rather than using pre-built VM images? Even with iSCSI, transferring data over the network is less efficient compared to using NVME over a local PCIe bus. In a data center, they use costly but fast network cards to reduce overhead and enable quick movement of virtual storage between servers. On a home network, this logic doesn’t quite apply, especially for gaming purposes.
I focus on implementing deduplication for games on NAS and ISCSI systems. This includes snapshots, compression, and redundancy, all stored directly on hard drives. Currently, I manage around 6TB of game data, which reduces to approximately 4.5TB after compression. If using NMVE alone, I’d need three 8TB NVMe drives. You can purchase them and ship them if needed. Your reasoning seems unclear—on gaming machines, cheaper 1/2TB NVMe caches exist, and there’s useful software like Primo Cache that handles this automatically. Games often load from NVMe cache without manual effort. The local LAN server ensures updates run at network speed, with speeds up to 2.5Gb. I’m also exploring 10GB local networking for even lower costs. For backup copies, I stick to CIFS shares rather than Windows networking, which I find less efficient. I’m curious why deduplication is important if you’re only saving some files.
The issue is definitely not what you expected because your actions conflict with how Windows handles file sharing permissions. You also brought up iSCSI, which adds another layer of complexity if you're trying to copy data to an iSCSI drive and a backup server over the same network. With a LAN cache already in place, it seems unnecessary to keep all games accessible everywhere at once, especially with slower loading times compared to local storage. Your admission about deduplication points to the root cause—this setup is overly complicated. There are many more experienced networking users here than I am, and their silence suggests this arrangement might not be practical. You mentioned LAN cache, but why would you need backups of games on iSCSI drives at all?
I play games using the NAS with the setup you described. It employs ISCSI and multiple ISCSI connections functioning properly. Promxox runs as a VM with Truenas Scale. Backups are stored on another machine using standard Windows shares. Deduplication helps reduce drive costs across both devices. I don’t focus much on Windows networking beyond that backup purpose, since I mainly use Windows for gaming. Why would I enable ISCSI when it’s not necessary?
The problem here is you keep asking for instructions on how to do something that if its even possible would be a hack, and you've not explained exactly why you think you need to do this. Given nobody else is replying, I think that's a pretty clear indication that the real solution here is to try to figure out if this can be done the right way to begin with. I'm not familiar with truenas scale but typically anything using SAMBA will work on the same principle. You have a share, you set which users have read access, which users have write access and often the OS user/group the files on that share are owned by. eg If you have two shares, one pointing to a location you are using de-duplication and one without, they would both have permission from the same user account. As for my previous question, I didn't say you were backing up to iSCSI, you said the PCs store their games on iSCSI drives and therefore if you are doing a backup its reading from those iSCSI drives over the network, and then sending that data to the shares. This means you are doubling the bandwidth use on the network and it will all be very very slow due to how much worse network IO is compared to physically connected drives. For example, I backup my server using USB drives directly connected to it. Because copying to a USB drive completes the backup about ten times faster than over the network would. Not due to bandwidth, but the inherent performance issues with network shares, especially when doing lots of small files vs a few large ones. But in your configuration you'd have the bandwidth bottleneck AND the IO bottleneck. Yet you have those games already backed up on your LAN cache, so why do they need backing up again anyway? As for "why I was questioning your use of de-duplication", well mainly as it seems to be highly recommended to NOT use it . That link suggests the cost of the hardware to make it work reliably (once your drives start filling up) would greatly outweigh the cost of having a large NVME drive on each PC. Quite apart from the fact having that storage would be orders of magnitude better performance. I'm concerned if you sort this problem out, some time down the line your de-duplication iSCSI solution is going to completely fall over due to lack of RAM and it will all have been a huge waste of time.