Another "you don't have permissions to add files in that folder" post

NJMorf

Explorer
Joined
Aug 9, 2017
Messages
53
Hi all.

I've been searching on and off for months for a way to fix this problem and I'm getting nowhere. I've tried multiple approaches that I've found in this forum, the Nextcloud forum and other places and none of them have helped. Can anyone tell me what's wrong and how to fix it?

My storage is created in FreeNAS in a pool called volume_1, which contains these two datasets (and several others that I don't access using Nextcloud):

Cloud: user www, owner wheel, permissions rwxrwx--- applied recursively.
Media: user plex, owner plex, permissions rwxrwrwx applied recursively.

These are shared in FreeNAS as SMB shares.

I have Nextcloud installed from the Plugins list, rather than in a manually created jail or VM. I have enabled External Storages and mounted the following:

Archives - local - /mnt/Cloud/Archives
Neil - local - /mnt/Cloud/Neil
Music - local - /mnt/Media/Music

For all three, I've left the Authentication set to None and made them available for all users.

In the Nextcloud Windows client I have created five sync connections with the following Nextcloud locations mapped to Windows folders as follows:
Archives - C:\Storage\Archives
Neil/Documents - C:\Users\Neil\Documents
Neil/Downloads - C:\Users\Neil\Downloads
Neil/Pictures - C:\Users\Neil\Pictures
Music - C:\Storage\Music

I had set these up initially using FreeNAS 11: after I upgraded to 12, I reinstalled the plugin using the then current version so that I could manage it in the new FreeNAS UI. The server-side folders were all empty, so the data was synced from my Windows 10 desktop over to the server.

Nextcloud is inconsistent on whether or not it can save anything to any of the first four locations, all on the Cloud dataset. For example, I can't create folders or files in the root of the Downloads or Pictures folders, but files I add to some existing folders in Pictures seem to be successfully synched. Sometimes the client shows green ticks against these locations, but if I manually force a sync, they all revert back to red crosses and report the missing permissions.

At the same time, the Music folder in the Media dataset appears to be working fine. This was set up for Plex but Nextcloud does not appear to have any problems with adding or removing files from it. To be fair, I do frequently find that I can't delete files from within Windows, but that has always (so far) been fixed by reapplying the current permissions recursively.

I've seen several suggestions about which owner, user and permissions Nextcloud should use. Here are the ones I have tried with the Cloud dataset, as far as I can remember:
user www, group www
user www, group wheel
user root, group root
user plex, group plex
user neil, group shares (the account is a member of the group, the group is one I set up for SMB shares in FreeNAS)

I've tried setting permissions rwxrwx---, rwxrwxr-x, rwxrwxrwx, applied with and without recursion, but nothing seems to help. It seems like Nextcloud is able to manage some folders normally but others not at all, and it generally fails to do anything with new files or folders I create at the Windows end.

Can anyone tell me how I can fix this? Am I better off deleting the Nextcloud installation and reinstalling (and if so, what's the best way to set it up)? I'm considering just creating a new dataset and then resyncing everything again from the desktop, but I'm worried that the problem will just recur after a while, if not immediately.

Thanks in advance.
 
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