Permission denied when tyring to use Transmission to download files to a mounted NTFS drive

Question

I am running a Raspberry pi 2 with Ubuntu 16.04.2 as a server. I want to run transmission-daemon and download files to an external HDD formatted with NTFS. When I try to download anything to the mounted drive it downloads about 5 MBs and then says Permission Denied.

The corresponding line in /etc/fstab is the following:

UUID=2656894D1130A1AD   /media/tamas/NAS ntfs-3g defaults,noatime,uid=debian-
transmission,gid=ntfs-users,umask=000  0       0

My user (tamas) is in the ntfs-users group, and with this umask everything has 777 permissions anyway. So when logged in as tamas, I can read the disk, change and create files.

transmission-daemon start script is as default, it runs under the debian-transmission user.

I don't understand why transmission-daemon has no permission to write on the external hard drive. As far as I know I have set permissions up in a way that it should allow it to write on the disk.

Thank you for your help!

Tamas

Answer 1

I managed to get it working. The solution was to change the permissions of /media/tamas/ (The ntfs file system is mounted to /media/tamas/NAS.) to allow the debian-transmission user to read and write it.

I would also like to note, that in other places I have seen people look at /etc/init.d/ to change start scripts. Ubuntu doesn't use that, and if I changed the user, transmission starts under, there it didn't actually change that. Ubuntu uses systemd to start services, and my transmission-daemon start script was located at /lib/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service.

One other problem I had was that I could not use shell as the debian-transmission user, because of its configuration. Then I found the following command:

sudo su --shell /bin/bash --login debian-transmission

I found this very useful in debugging the problem.