Hello fellow self-hosters,

I’m fairly new to hosting my own services and have been learning as I go, but have run into an issue and am not sure where to look for answers. Hoping you all can help a confused soul out.

Up until now, I’ve been running the .arr services (Sonarr, Radarr, Overseerr, etc.) on my Windows machine with minimal issue, but I’ve been working on setting up a separate Debian machine to get it off my main PC.

I’m following this guide to get everything setup, and at this point I have all my services setup and running, but I can’t seem to get Radarr and Sonarr to work correctly. My indexers work, Radarr will grab the wanted file and Deluge will download it, but when the download finishes it just stays in limbo; Radarr is unable to import it into the library due to invalid permissions (It doesn’t have Write permissions).

I’ve done sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /path/to/ROOT/directory and sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /path/to/HDDSTORAGE/directory as the guide instructs under ‘Folder Structure’ (of course replacing the paths with my actual paths), but to no avail.

Where I think the problem is is my actual Media Library. All the services are running on their own laptop, but my 10TB HDD is still in my main Windows PC. Until I build a new rig specifically for the server, I can’t put the HDD into the laptop. In Windows, the TV and Movie folders are network shared and I have them mounted on my server in the respective locations where Radarr and Sonarr should be looking. At this point, the .arr services can definitely read the mounted directories, but can’t make new ones for new shows and movies.

  • @just_another_person
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    41 month ago

    Just make sure you’re actually authenticating to the network share and not browsing an open/anonymous share. The user perms on the host of the volume need to match for read/write, or need to be publicly writable.

    • @MrQuallzinOP
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      11 month ago

      Yup, the mount is authenticated and the Share Permissions on Windows have it set to Full Control for Everyone, plus ‘Password protected sharing’ is turned off under Advanced Network Settings.

      • @just_another_person
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        1 month ago

        Okay, so on the device which is connecting to the share, from a cli, can you create files on the share mount? Don’t use your GUI if using one. Go to a prompt, and touch or copy a file in the mount location.

        • @MrQuallzinOP
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          11 month ago

          No GUI on my end (It’s been fun learning to use a headless server). I have to sudo to be able to do anything in the mount locations. Using ls -s, the permissions and owner aren’t changing after using chown and chmod.

          • @just_another_person
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            1 month ago

            Okay, so you need to match the uid/gid of your user on the client machine with whatever is on the host volume machine because it seems like your auth is not set right. You probably want a dedicated user. If you’re not sure what that means, just move on to the next bit.

            On Windows machine: create new user, make sure ownership is set in permissions, log in with that user on the client machine. Then you won’t need sudo. You can Google to find more explanation, but that’s the gist.

            If you need to sudo to create files, it means your Windows share isn’t allowing whatever authenticated user you have doesn’t have permissions to actually write on the Windows machine.

            • @MrQuallzinOP
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              11 month ago

              I’ll look into that, thanks!

              We just had a total power outage, and restarting my main machine I remembered I have Linux Mint installed as duel boot. I’ve been waiting for a final push to get me to migrate away from Windows. Would it be easier to do all this from Linux Mint instead of Windows?

              • @just_another_person
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                11 month ago

                It’s certainly more cohesive if you’re doing a Samba<>Samba setup. Either combo will work though, you just need to make sure of the permissions for the share, and that your connected uid/gid is set properly for read/write.

  • 0^2
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    21 month ago

    Can you provide your /etc/fstab (I assume you are automounting) on the *arrs machine?

    • @MrQuallzinOP
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      11 month ago

      The following was added to my fstab //192.168.86.181/TrixieTV /home/brobot/Storage/Completed/TV cifs credentials=/home/brobot/.smb 0 0 //192.168.86.181/TrixieMovies /home/brobot/Storage/Completed/Movies cifs credentials=/home/brobot/.smb 0 0

      The credentials are using a new user ‘moose’ that owns the folders and has full control user=moose password=3141

      • @[email protected]
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        31 month ago

        OK, so right now you’re mounting the remote shares as user moose, but then you tried to chown those folders to user $USER. In case you don’t know this, the $ sign indicates a variable; the command is actually subbing in the name of the user who ran the command.

        Now the question here is, what user is radarr / sonarr running under? If you’re running them directly on your machine without docker, that’s probably being set by a systemd task that runs the programs in startup.

        You need to make sure that that user has the ability to write to those media folders. The simplest way to do this would probably be to edit the systemd units to run the arr programs as moose, since that’s apparently an unprivileged user you created just for mounting the shares.