So in the many years of running freeness → truenas I have managed to bork up my permissions more times than I care to admit. For instance, I think at one point I did the my pool equivalent of chmod 777 -R /mnt/tank
So what is the permission supposed to be for the uppermost level directory? Is it better to set these permissions in the GUI? Also, I am a Mac user primarily and have avoided ACLs - should I invest in figuring out an active directory for my home?
I appreciate it - this is quite literally the worst part of any home server.
I have been experimenting and struggling with permissions on truenas scale myself the past few weeks. What sharing protocol are you wanting to use, you said mac so I will assume SMB?
SMB in TrueNAS scale was working fine for me, I was having major issues when I tried to combine NFS+CIFS for multiple client types (windows+linux).
Back to your question, you want to select “SMB” type when creating a ZFS dataset (you can also alter this after creation). Then after that you want to click “View permissions” and likely want to do “Strip ACL” button and then select to apply a preset like NFS_HOME (works for SMB).
If you want time machine to work on SMB you will need to enable a special flag for it under System > Services > SMB config settings page IIRC it may be inside the share configuration.
I thought this youtube video was very helpful and go into necessary detail about ACLs (its the CORE / bsd flavor but iX naming nomenclature is the same, so if you pay attention at how its setup in BSD you can replicate it on linux TrueNAS Core: Configuring Shares, Permissions, Snapshots & Shadow Copies - YouTube