Transmission, FireFly & miniDLNA fundamental design issues

[ghostwolf59]

Hi,
I've just migrated to FreeNAS 8.3.1 - a somewhat painful exercise where I've gone from 0.7.2.

I've been scratching my head when it comes to the mainstream plugins (Transmission, FireFly and miniDLNA) - Following the tutorials such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp_pW-8Laro
it seem that all plugins installed relies on one and the same directory.

I've opted for UFS folders instead of new zfs mounts where I've created /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins folder structure holding plugins and and media etc that would simulate two new zfs mount points.
I realize this not is the desired way, but the principle of setting up a CFS share pointing to a UFS store with folders is not really that different from setting up zfs mounts.

The setup works, but one thing really puzzles me...

The plugin configuration is one for all. In my case it would point to ...
Plugin Jail Path: /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins/PluginJail
Plugin Archive path: /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins/Media
A new jls /user/Downloads was created

This is fine for Transmissions, but when I add the FireFly and miniDLNA I am forced to point to the same /user/Downloads directory.

I'm sure this is convenient when you want a seamless integration between downloaded torrents and overall media available
- my problem with this approach is that I would end up with a massive mess between torrents downloaded (which I may or may not want to keep long term) and other media that I want to keep in an organized way for longer periods.:(
FreeNAS 0.7.2 allowed me to point the media server to any mount across all my UFS drives.

The FreeNAS 8 plugin configuration restricts my view to the /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins/PluginJail/Plugins directory and this is NOT where I keep my mp3's and movies.
This restricted view in turn more or less forces me to point to the /usr/Downloads within when mapping the Watch and Download directory (Transmission), mp3 dir (FireFly) and Media Directory (miniDLNA)
- one bucket approach which is stupid as...

Is it just me or is there a fundamental design flaw with these plugins or...?

I would have liked to be able to point to a torrent download, media source and mp3 source anywhere on my network. :) But what I'm faced with now seem to be to mix all my media in one and the same location.:(
Apart from the mess and the nightmare of organizing this long term is that all my media won't fit in one and the same location.

Any suggestions on how to get around this problem ?

cheers


I hope there is a way around this - The idea of

 

[ProtoSD]

Is it just me or is there a fundamental design flaw with these plugins or...?

It's just you :p

Unless there's something different about UFS partitions (I only use ZFS), there shouldn't be anything stopping you from creating the folders you speak of from the command line and using the "mountpoint" feature of FreeNAS to link them to whatever folders you want inside the jail.

Did you miss that section of the manual? ;)

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Plugins#Mount_Points


Take a deep breath and spend some time checking out the manual and trying things out. Make sure you have a backup or at the very least a snapshot in case you missed something....

 

[ghostwolf59]

Ok, so it's me then :p

It's just you :p

Unless there's something different about UFS partitions (I only use ZFS), there shouldn't be anything stopping you from creating the folders you speak of from the command line and using the "mountpoint" feature of FreeNAS to link them to whatever folders you want inside the jail.

Did you miss that section of the manual? ;)

Ok, so it's me then :p

No I didn't miss the mount points - It's been created - this is not it though and I still think there is some fundamental issues with this - surprised if I were the only one commit across this though.

After posting my original message I decided to create two additional plugin mount points - I now have three mounts - one for torrents, one for Media and one for mp3's.
I then had to jexec where I created two new directories (/usr/Media & /usr/mp3)

This setup now allows me to create a level of separation that I want between torrents, music and other media - however, when doing so all my media seem to be replicated across from the source destination (UFS share) into ...
mp3's: /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins/PluginJail/Plugins/usr/mp3/*.* Resulting in 78.5 GB is duplicated across disks :(
Media files such as Movies: /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins/PluginJail/Plugins/usr/Media/*.* Resulting in that 746 GB is duplicated across disks :(

This is really bad and seem like a total waste

Another issue is that its impossible to include two or more source destinations - say I wanted to add both movies and music to my media server where the content is stored on different UFS drives - just cant do it.

The old NAS allowed you to add multiple drive paths to the media configuration.

 

[ProtoSD]

... Resulting in 78.5 GB is duplicated across disks :(
Media files such as Movies: /mnt/STORE01/FreeNasJailPlugins/PluginJail/Plugins/usr/Media/*.* Resulting in that 746 GB is duplicated across disks :(

This is really bad and seem like a total waste

I promise you, your data is not duplicated.

Another issue is that its impossible to include two or more source destinations - say I wanted to add both movies and music to my media server where the content is stored on different UFS drives - just cant do it.

The old NAS allowed you to add multiple drive paths to the media configuration.

I'm sure the transition is a little difficult, but I'm fairly confident what you are trying to do can be done, just a little differently. I'm sure when you began using version 7 not everything made sense right away, so don't take another deep breath ;)

 

[ghostwolf59]

data IS duplicated

I promise you, your data is not duplicated.

As far as I can see data is duplicated

My S: share is /mnt/STORE03

The Plugin resides on /mnt/STORE01 CIFS share Q

Comparing one of the media folder content on /mnt/STORE03/with /usr/Media/ show that the plugin directory have the same number of files as the source where the size of the plugin content also matches the source.

My STORE01 available space also significantly got less space available



All up the plugin have resulted in a total of 825 GB of duplication.

Same thing with the Transmission - The initial allocation from torrents is duplicated across multiple folders

O:\FreeNasJailPlugins\Media\Downloads
O:\FreeNasJailPlugins\PluginJail\Plugins\mnt\plugins\Downloads
O:\FreeNasJailPlugins\PluginJail\Plugins\usr\Downloads

same content and size residing on three different places on disk


- If this isn't duplicating data then I don't know what is

 

[Caesar]

Why are you using windows to measure your free space? I am new to freenas so keep that in mind. you should think of a mount point as a short cut (or symbolic link if you know what that is) Each one of those folders are pointing to the same files on your hard disk. This does not mean that each folder has duplicated every file. That would be a huge waste of space. What is your available space in the view volumes tab? or you can go to the reporting tab and look at the history of your free space.

 

[ProtoSD]

Why are you using windows to measure your free space? I am new to freenas so keep that in mind. you should think of a mount point as a short cut (or symbolic link if you know what that is) Each one of those folders are pointing to the same files on your hard disk. This does not mean that each folder has duplicated every file. That would be a huge waste of space. What is your available space in the view volumes tab? or you can go to the reporting tab and look at the history of your free space.

Thanks for helping out Caesar, you are 100% correct.