Transmission on FreeNAS umask / owner of files

Question

going slightly crazy with Transmission installed on FreeNas 8.3.1 (not in a jail)

Everything is fine except the ownership / permissions of the downloaded files, they are all owned by root and have mask: rwxr-sr-x

I have tried changing 'umask' in settings.json from 18 to 0 (read it somewhere) but that doesn't help, it appears to be ignored; what I want is for ANY user to be able to delete these files (rw.rw.rw.), or at a minimum the group, not just the owner; I don't know what I should change umask to for this to work. Probably really easy if you understand umask...

alternatively, how do I change the settings so the owner is another user, not root; i start the transmission on startup as a service /daemon, I tried changing the start up script to add daemon-user, but it seems ignored as well, files are still created by root.

any tips greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Two things you should check:

1. Did you stop the daemon before editing the settings.json file?

   service transmission stop
   

2. Does the user that runs transmission-daemon have ownership of the download-dir specified in your settings.json?

Try

    "umask": 2,

which should make your files owner and group writeable.

Answer 2

The preferred method is to use the Plugin architecture. That being said you could create a cronjob to re-apply the wanted permissions on a given folder or series of files.

Answer 3

If you installed transmission as a FreeNAS plugin, checkout that plugin's configuration options in the GUI as shown here.

If you installed it manually, have a look at this page. It shows you how to configure transmission from /etc/rc.conf. This certainly gives you the option to run transmission as an ordinary user instead of as root, which seems a good idea.