I’m trying to setup my first homeserver with pods alone but I can’t add my mounted /data (it’s an external HDD) folder to the root folder, but the /app and /config works. It’s a common issue but somehow I wasn’t able to solve it.

OS: Rocky Linux 9.3

External HDD (WD Elements)

external HDD in /etc/fstab:

# WD Elements drive
UUID=4655386a-5ccf-4c7b-ad6a-c0b90ccf8454 /home/privatenoob/media/storage1 xfs defaults 0 0

radarr.service:

[Unit]
Description=Radarr Movie Server
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=podman run --name=radarr -e PUID=1000 -e PGID=1000 -e UMASK=002 -p 7878:7878 -v radarr-config:/config -v /home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek:/data --restart unless-stopped lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest
ExecStop=podman stop radarr
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

Permissions:

drwxr-xr-x. 2 privatenoob privatenoob 6 Jan 17 16:52 Filmek

drwxr-xr-x   4 abc    users    139 Jan 18 19:44 config
drwxr-xr-x   2 root   root       6 Jan 17 15:52 data

chown -R 1000:1000 /data didn’t work. It gave permission denied, even though I used root (probably this is because of -e PUID=1000?)

  • @genieEnglish
    3•11 months ago

    There are a few ways around it. The simplest is to add the --privileged option.

    The more secure method with podman is by specifying a user (ex -u 10001:10001) from your extended subuid:subgid range after your full and proper setup of rootless podman :-)

    Then instead of chown you’ll want to use the oddly named podman unshare tool to automatically set the permissions of the host directory. You would then want to start your service with systemctl --user instead of sudo systemctl

    • PrivateNoobOPEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      Okay so I’ve done these steps (it seems rootless podman have been setup by Rocky automatically):

      1. Get subuid:subgid with /etc/subuid:

      privatenoob:100000:65536

      2.:Changed ExecStart to this:

      ExecStart=podman run --name=radarr -u 100000:65536 -p 7878:7878 -v radarr-config:/config -v /home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek:/data --restart unless-stopped lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest

      3.: podman unshare chown -R 100000:65536 /home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek/

      Unfortunately unsharing gave me invalid arguments.

      chown: changing ownership of '/home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek/': Invalid argument

      I have tried by leaving the -e PUID=1000 parts on but those didn’t work either. Yeah and I’m using systemctl --user. Thanks for your help!

      • @genieEnglish
        3•11 months ago

        Ah! I think I see the confusion.

        # /etc/subuid
privatenoob:100000:65536

        This denotes the range of subuids that are available to your user.

        -u 100000:65536

        This part specifies two things ([UID]:[GID]) even though it’s the same syntax as the earlier part that specifies one range :)

        I suspect what you will want to do is use the following:

        # change ownership of the directory to the UID:GID that matches something in your subuid:subgid range, in this case 10000:10000
podman unshare chown -R 100000:10000 /home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek/

        Then we can specify that the user in the container can match the user (UID) we specified above:

        ExecStart=podman run --name=radarr -u 10000:10000 -p 7878:7878 -v radarr-config:/config -v /home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek:/data --restart unless-stopped lscr.io/linuxserver/radarr:latest

        As a note, if you copy/pasted that ExecStart line, you might have gotten the invalid argument error because you entered 100000 (outside of your subuid range, i.e. >65536) instead of 10000.

        There’s a nice guide that gives a great walkthrough. I’ll dig through my bookmarks and add it here when I get some time.

        Hope this helps!

  • DjootEnglish
    3•11 months ago

    On my OpenSuse server I had to add :Z after /data in the bind, dont know if it applies to your setup, but it is easy to test and see if it works

    • PrivateNoobOPEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      It doesn’t even start unfortunately, but thanks for your help tho!

  • @[email protected]English
    2•11 months ago

    Try running the chown outside of the container: chown -R 1000:1000 /home/privatenoob/media/storage1/Filmek

    • PrivateNoobOPEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      Doesn’t work either with both running this before starting/building the container and also while running it. Thanks for the help tho!

  • @[email protected]English
    2•11 months ago

    Drop the / in “/data” for the chown command. Now it is looking for a data folder in root, and not the one in “Filmek”.

    Don’t know if it will help with your issue thou

  • @[email protected]English
    2•11 months ago

    Are you doing rootless or rootfull podman? I am doing rootless and I have the following in my radarr container - PUID=0 PGID=0

    • PrivateNoobOPEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      I’m doing rootless most likely, I just use the default Rocky Linux 9 setup with the Container Tools option turned on while the setup process. This didn’t work either for me. Did you start the service in sudo systemctl or in systemctl --user mode? Thanks for your help!

      • @[email protected]English
        2•11 months ago

        Hey, sorry for the late reply. I am running rootless using a dedicated user, so I use systemctl --user to control the container. From what I understand, when running rootless the root user inside the container correlates to the outside user (which is running the container), in terms of permissions. The external directories I bind mount into the container as externally owned by my dedicated user, so that the root user inside the container owns them (inside the container).