So… I can’t believe this is even a rabbit hole that I had to go down.

99/10 I find linux operates in a more “it just works” fashion, or at least, I can find some way of getting it to work.

But I have come up against one of the most baffling issues: Is it basically impossible to torrent directly to a network drive in linux?

I’m downloading a largish scientific torrent. Its ~1.5 tb. I consider that to be a big, but not really that big of a dataset.

And what I can-not fathom, is that for whatever reason, it seems practically impossible to torrent directly from my (user) machine to a network attached storage device.

Has any one else ever encountered this issue? This seems ridiculous to me and that I must be missing something very very obvious. But to get this to work, I ended up having to install a torrent client on my NAS and download it directly. Which is not my preferred way to do things.

Thoughts? Reactions? Have you encountered this issue yourself?

  • TropicalDingdongOP
    2·
    1 month ago

    There’s plenty of ways to make it happen. Odd that you’re having an issue at all - does your torrent client just not like network mounts?

    You can always use a symlink/hard link to the network device, then your client will only see a local path.

    This is exactly how I would have expected it to work. I’ve tried every client I could (qbTorrent, deluge, transmission, might have been a few more). I tried hard links, smb, yep. All of it. And the deeper I went the more of an issue it seemed to be. I genuinely can-not comprehend how a torrent client wouldn’t just work with a network drive. I stopped trying to fix the issue because I’m now downloading the torrent using my NAS client (again, NOT my preferred approach. I don’t want my NAS doing anything other than being a NAS).

    • B-TR3E@feddit.org
      2·
      1 month ago

      Transmission and QBittorrent definitely work with at least NFS and 99% also with SMB (SMB has crappy performance compared to NFS). NAS client sounds suspicios. Some of them still are using SMB1 which is slow as fuck and full of security flaws. I’d use some network tool like ifconfig (Debian based distros) or iptraf or, depending on your hardware, ethtool, mii-tool or the like.

      • TropicalDingdongOP
        1·
        1 month ago

        NAS client sounds suspicios.

        Yeah, I hate that I’m doing it. But I couldn’t afford taking more time than I had already invested.

        I’ll try the NFS mount option. Thats something I haven’t’ tried yet.

          • B-TR3E@feddit.org
            1·
            1 month ago

            Interesting. Might be a file locking issue with SMB. I didn’t think of it before but a torrent download needs to be open to read and write until completed whith permanent changes to the open file. I would not assume SMB1 do handle that too well.