Plugin/Transmission Config Help!

[chris pucknell]

Hi

I've just set up a freenas pc (running from USB flash drive), stuffed it full of of HDD's, ZRaid and simple permissions for use on my windows network. Of course, I wanted more. I wanted plugins.

Unix(ish?) is new to me, so I am reliant on any information I can glean from the internets. I am having fun learning how to navigate the shell / terminal. When I grew up, we ran Doom from DOS, but I've never had the chance to mess with anything like this.

Following guides, I have installed Transmission 2.82 on Freenas 9.1.1 x64 with the hopes of getting some torrenting going. But i've encountered some problems.
1. The 'Watch' function does not seem to work at all.
2. I found transmission forgetting files it was downloading sometimes! (though this seems to have stopped on it's own somehow).
3. Files I have completed downloading do not appear to exist.
4. Settings.json (Jason?) seems to reset itself at random.

I am downloading files to a dataset, outside of the jail dataset. My research leads me to believe that this could be some sort of permission thing. Using every granule of cunning I possess, I set "Umask" 0 in Settings.json. I believe the number refers to file permissions in some way. But this does not seem to have helped.

Also, if it is indeed a permission thing, then I may need to find out the 'user' for the plugin, or else make one. But I have no idea how to go about this.

The 'Storage' option associated with the Transmission jail also baffles me, as you can apparently make the necessary settings from the Transmission webgui. When I adjust the storage settings, I get error messages in the gui. Files state "No data found!"

Also, I have set transmission so that it is scheduled to download only at night, with the counter-intuitive turtle icon alternative speed limits function. At 0 kB/s, is Transmission not eating bandwidth searching for peers still?

I can see that this thread might be better served on an actual Transmission forum! But thought I'd dump it on here anyway as I'm sure the problem lies in general plugin configuration that is eluding me.

Apologies for being such a humongous noob. Please point me the right direction as I am out of ideas. Any help or advice would be amazing.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

How are you editing the config? If you do manual edits, or edits from the Transmission WebUI, they can get reset by FreeNAS when it generates a config based on the options set there.

 

[chris pucknell]

it seems to reset to default settings of it's own accord, but perhaps it is being caused by me fiddling with it... I have edited the settings manually, and have stopped messing with it. It seems to have stuck with them overnight at least.

 

[Dusan]

it seems to reset to default settings of it's own accord, but perhaps it is being caused by me fiddling with it... I have edited the settings manually, and have stopped messing with it. It seems to have stuck with them overnight at least.

It will reset the files every time the plugin restarts or when you touch the transmission plugin settings in the FreeNAS GUI. If you want to configure transmission by directly editing the config files you can install transmission in a jail. Just create a portjail (uncheck the vanilla option) and run "pkg install transmission-daemon" inside the jail.

 

[chris pucknell]

Cool ok I can give that a try :) ty for your comments. But I am a bit hesitant; if I get rid of the old 'PBI' of transmission, will I not lose the data I have downloaded?

Also I don't understand, how does a portjail differ from the regular jail, or apparently what I have installed transmission into; a pluginjail? I can't seem to find any documentation on the features of the jail types except that they don't support things unless you uncheck vanilla. I'm guessing that this portjail will afford some kind of protection to the settings? But how ?

My primary concern is that I don't seem to have any access to these files I have downloaded, or will download.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Cool ok I can give that a try :) ty for your comments. But I am a bit hesitant; if I get rid of the old 'PBI' of transmission, will I not lose the data I have downloaded?

Also I don't understand, how does a portjail differ from the regular jail, or apparently what I have installed transmission into; a pluginjail? I can't seem to find any documentation on the features of the jail types except that they don't support things unless you uncheck vanilla. I'm guessing that this portjail will afford some kind of protection to the settings? But how ?

My primary concern is that I don't seem to have any access to these files I have downloaded, or will download.

you would lose the data you download if you delete the jail because the jail is installed to it's own ZFS dataset (kind of like a partition). that's why the recommended method is to have a separate dataset for your data then for your data and just link it into your plugin jail.

what's wrong with changing transmission's setting the FreeNAS config menu? If there's missing options you should make a bug report so they get included, hopefully by the 8.2 release.

 

[chris pucknell]

I've already got a seperate dataset for the files, which they in theory have been downloaded into, but they do not appear there, nor anywhere, while Transmission insists that they are saved in that location. Could I have messed up the datasets somehow? I've got them set up as follows:
/mnt/MainArray/Media
/mnt/MainArray/Media/Films
/mnt/MainArray/Media/Music
etc...

FreeNAS allows you to set a Watch, config and download directory but little else, most of the action takes place in the transmission WebGUI. I guess it would be nice if the FreeNAS config let you set everything up, speed throttling and that kind of thing, but I've no great demand for that kind of stuff.

 

[Dusan]

Also I don't understand, how does a portjail differ from the regular jail, or apparently what I have installed transmission into; a pluginjail? I can't seem to find any documentation on the features of the jail types except that they don't support things unless you uncheck vanilla. I'm guessing that this portjail will afford some kind of protection to the settings? But how ?

portjail and pluginjail are basically the same. The difference is in the package you install. The FreeNAS plugin .pbi contains the bits & pieces that make transmission configurable via FreeNAS GUI. The package you install via pkg install is a plain FreeBSD transmission package without any FreeNAS integration (i.e. you must configure it by editing the config files as it won't appear in the FreeNAS GUI).

 

[chris pucknell]

oh right I get it, so it would be the same but, tamper proof :)

 

[grendel69]

The storage option allows you to map folders outside the jail with folders inside the jail, since the jail is like a VM it has no access to storage outside otherwise. When you use add jail storage the source folder is the folder outside the jail and the destination is the folder inside the jail. (The create directory option will create the folder inside the jail for you.) Subfolders will be picked up too. Transmission puts data in the folder in the jail and this can then be seen outside the jail.

And I hope you meant ZFS zraid1 ;)

 

[chris pucknell]

oh yah zraid1 :p

I've set up the storage locations, and it seems to mirror the watch folder. Haaaang on... do I need to set up a storage folder for every dataset that I'm saving files into? So that tranmission has access?

I've just tried this; if I set multiple storage folders I get some odd results, the downloads folder suddenly seems to to contain itself... No downloaded files have appeared in any case.

 

[grendel69]

Yes, but only the root of each one, subfolders are picked up automagically. I have datasets for films, tvseries and videos so I have 3 storage entries in my jail.

 

[chris pucknell]

Right, this seems to be the root of where I was going wrong.

In my 'Plugins -> Transmission' settings I had set the downloads folder outside of the jail, which it had no access to, despite me setting up the storage bit under the jails settings. Now that I have corrected this, and individually set my downloads locations in the WebGUI, they are slowly appearing as Transmission moves stuff out of it's virtual attic, or whatever it is doing. Making the files manifest in our terrestrial plane of existence.

ty for everyones help on this! hopefully, I can stop bugging you now :)

 

[mike360x1]

Sorry for resurrecting this thread. I have one thing to add on to this. Rather than setting up transmission in a separate jail with pkg, is there a script that could be created to execute whenever the jail starts. (Given that the user wouldn't go into the transmission GUI and change things himself again).

The thing is, I don't have any knowledge on how to tackle this and was wondering if anyone had any insight on this.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Sorry for resurrecting this thread. I have one thing to add on to this. Rather than setting up transmission in a separate jail with pkg, is there a script that could be created to execute whenever the jail starts. (Given that the user wouldn't go into the transmission GUI and change things himself again).

The thing is, I don't have any knowledge on how to tackle this and was wondering if anyone had any insight on this.

what do you need the script to do? if you need something to run inside the jail when it runs you can write an init script for it and put it in /usr/local/etc/rc.d

 

[mike360x1]

what do you need the script to do? if you need something to run inside the jail when it runs you can write an init script for it and put it in /usr/local/etc/rc.d

This is more of a side thing, wondering if I can.

But I would set the download completed directory, HTTPS, and the port it listens on. I know that these things can't be changed via GUI. (It allows p/w and username but not HTTPS nor does it change the download completed directory. Only the "Incomplete" and "Watch" directories.

But, I guess the question now is, "why would I need to access Transmission outside my network?".

This reply is more like a "what can I do?", rather than "why?". I like to learn, that's all :D

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

you can change the completed download directory in the transmission webui, the port transmission listens on in the freenas configuration menu. transmission doesn't have an option to listen on https.

 

[mike360x1]

you can change the completed download directory in the transmission webui, the port transmission listens on in the freenas configuration menu. transmission doesn't have an option to listen on https.

Yeah, I know. It was a hypothetical question. I was wondering if one could avoid the hassle of going into Transmission GUI and changing it. Because of plugins like CouchPotato that depend on Transmission to be able to download in the correct location. And I might forget.

Anyways, I'm just a lazy guy. ;)

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Yeah, I know. It was a hypothetical question. I was wondering if one could avoid the hassle of going into Transmission GUI and changing it. Because of plugins like CouchPotato that depend on Transmission to be able to download in the correct location. And I might forget.

Anyways, I'm just a lazy guy. ;)

well you don't need to use the transmission webui. any setting managed by transmission can be changed from the commandline or transmission-remote interface, but those are even more work lol.

If you setup CP with the transmission API (not a torrent blackhole method) you can specify where it puts its movie downloads. in this case transmission's settings are completely ignored.

 

[mike360x1]

well you don't need to use the transmission webui. any setting managed by transmission can be changed from the commandline or transmission-remote interface, but those are even more work lol.

If you setup CP with the transmission API (not a torrent blackhole method) you can specify where it puts its movie downloads. in this case transmission's settings are completely ignored.

ah, good point, thanks for helping out a newbie like me :D