Just a quick post about an issue i’ve been having for a while that i’ve just managed to solve. A while ago I re-built my home nas, using Ubuntu Server instead of Freenas. I installed Transmission for downloading torrents, but could never get the watch folder functionality working correctly. I would setup the folder, tell the transmission config about it but everytime i dropped a file in the folder, it would just get ignored.

Well, tonight I have just managed to get it working. It turned out it was a permissions issue. When I dropped a .torrent file into the folder from my Windows 7 machine (shared out via samba), and looked at the permissions of the file (via an ls -al command from putty) the owner and group was set to nobody and nobody. This was even after I had set the owner/group on the folder with the -R (re-curse) option. If I set the ower/group manually from putty to the ‘debian-transmission’ user, transmission then picked up the file as expected and started the download.

So, I figured it must have been an issue with me dropping in the files from my Windows 7 machine via a Samba share. I had a look through the Samba docs, and came across the inherit owner option. By default this is no, so I amended my smb.conf file and placed inherit owner = yes in the global section, then restarted the smb service.

After the restart, I dropped another .torrent file in via my Windows machine and checked its permissions again. This time the owner was set to ‘debian-transmission’, and after a few seconds Transmission kicked in and started to download the file. Problem solved! Now I can look at using FlexGet to look at auto downloading torrents via an rss feed.