Tranmission: Getting the Downloads Directory Set Correctly

[mankyd]

I have a ZFS dataset where I keep all of my media: dvd's I've ripped, music I've purchased, software I've downloaded, etc. This is shared over nfs, so I can mount it remotely at /var/media. So far so good.

I installed the tranmission plugin. It downloads torrents, but here's where the problems begin:

1) I can't get it to download to the 'media' dataset that I have. I've tried symlinks in both directions, and I get problems
a) If I put the symlink in my 'media' dataset, my nfs mounts can't access them
b) If I put the symlink in the jail, transmission starts complaining

2) As a slight aside, if I stop tranmission via the gui, I can't get it to start again. It simply complains that there is an error.

How can I get transmission downloading into my 'media' dataset so that it works over nfs? Thanks!

 

[William Grzybowski]

Services->Plugins->Mount Points

But download dir has a bug and will only work with the default settings

 

[jm0]

So thats a bug?

The download directory location setting is driving me nuts! Tried editing the configuration every which way. Does anyone know a workaround?

 

[William Grzybowski]

Yes, stop using beta software for production ;)

 

[mankyd]

The workaround I found was to set the download directory through the web gui. It won't survive a restart, but that's generally ok since I don't restart my nas all that often.

 

[jm0]

@mankyd - I'd be happy with that if it would work for me. I cleared out my watch folder and also cleared out my .../home/resume folder (which I assume means a fresh start). Restarted the daemon, changed the download target in gui, added a torrent to watch folder aaaand - no dice. Always downloads to .../home folder. (am trying to change it to "/usr/pbi/trans*/mnt/download" which is a "mount point" I configured in the FreeNAS gui)

@william - ok fair enough. Maybe I will downgrade to 8.0.4 and install transmission daemon from cli (was able to install a subversion server that way). What I am wondering is whether I will run into the same bugs? The other annoyance is that every time I restart the transmission daemon it alters the permissions on my watch and download folders. I keep having to ssh into my jail and do "chmod -R a+w" so that I can access them as a samba share. Also I am not too sure how to setup a "mount point" outside of the FreeNAS gui (is that what symlinks are?). Any tip? A link maybe? thx

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

the jail shouldn't be able to edit permissions on the folder outside of the jail. Thats weird that samba is affected by permissions from within the jail...

 

[paleoN]

Unless those are the folder(s) jm0 has configured as his mount point for the jail and he also uses them outside the jail for his samba share. Then it could be changing his permissions.

To manually create mount points read these links from [post=26776]protosd's post[/post].

@jm0 - start a new thread if you still need help with your mount points. The GUI seemed to create them fine for me at least.

 

[ProtoSD]

The other annoyance is that every time I restart the transmission daemon it alters the permissions on my watch and download folders. I keep having to ssh into my jail and do "chmod -R a+w" so that I can access them as a samba share.

jm0, I don't use transmission, but this seems suspiciously like a bug. It'll probably get fixed at some point, but you can help make sure it does if you open a ticket at support.freenas.org

 

[duckman]

Regarding permissions, I'm not seeing exactly what I think you're seeing, but:

Files that transmissions downloads (ie, the file(s) themselves and the assorted .torrent files) area created with uid 1003 (on my system) with perms rw,r,r. This uid is the uid for transmission *inside the jail*. There is no user with uid 1003 on the main/parent NAS. This means my user "james" (who has uid 1004) can't delete/rename/move the files (he does have read permission though).

I have to ssh in, su - and chown -R james /folder/with/the/files before I can do anything via my samba/nfs shares

For reference my setup is like this:

/mnt/Data/Transmission (Data is my tank, Transmission is a dataset owned by "james" but with world-write perms)
/mnt/Data/Jail (dataset) with PJail_BETA3 folder inside it (where the jail lives)

I made a simple folder in the jail: mkdir /mnt/Data/jail/PJail_BETA3/mnt/Transmission and chown'd that to james as well and made it world-writable

Mounted /mnt/Data/Transmission on /mnt/Data/Jail/PJail_BETA3/mnt/Transmission via the mount point editor gui

Transmission is set to have it's home in /mnt/Transmission (relative path inside the jail)
Downloads are supposed to go in /mnt/Transmission/Downloads but don't (this is a known bug, they get downloaded to /mnt/Transmission instead) as are "Watched files"

Transmission does not change the permission of the Transmission *folder* itself but it does download it's files into there, and *they* are owned by uid 1003.

 

[Don Pascual]

I had the same problem what i discovered is that when creating the mount point through the GUI the mount was there and could see it in the jail and i could access it through a AFP share but when i started a download in transmission it still went to the original directory in /usr/pbi/transmission-amd64/etc/transmission/home/Downloads so when i checked the settings.json in /usr/pbi/transmission-amd64/etc/transmission/home it was still pointing to /usr/pbi/transmission-amd64/etc/transmission/home/Downloads no matter what i put in the gui.
Once i vi-ed the file and changed it to my mount point which is /media and then saved it restarted transmission downloaded a torrent and then .part file showed up in my media mount