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Torrent download directly to network drive? (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/asklinux@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] 5 points 9 months ago (1 child)

I mount my nas to /media and then can choose that as a destination with qbitorrent. Was zero issue so it sounds for sure like a quirk of your system.

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    • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I haven't used torrents in a very, very long time, but that seems rather odd to me considering everything else I can do with network mounts... How are you mounting the NAS, and what sort of problem/errors are you encountering?

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah I only use them sparingly, and usually I'm just downloading to my local client.

    This is basically the issue from 2 years ago on lvl1tech forums:

    https://forum.level1techs.com/t/its-2024-why-cant-i-easily-save-torrents-to-a-share-drive/206022

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    For what it's worth, the problem in the linked thread was Flatpak/snap apps that are sandboxed so that they can only access files and folders in your home directory.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 months ago

    What’s you network topology? Wired or WLAN? Switches, hubs, routers, repeaters, encryption, APs, nominal speed? If WLAN, how’s the signal, how many other devices, etc. Networking is complex…

    I think this is circling the issue.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Are you running the downloader as a sandboxed/containerized app? (Flatpak, snap, etc.)? Those can have weird issues with accessing the file system due to the isolation they implement to try to make things more secure.

    Depending on which distro you're running, you might also check to see if there's something going on with SELinux or AppArmor; sometimes those security features, though well-intentioned, can cause cryptic problems. I think you should see an error in dmesg if something like that is going on.

    Another thought is that maybe you can try mounting the NAS yourself via command line with the mount command to a simpler path (e.g. to /mnt/nas) rather than using GVFS via the GUI (with it's complicated auto-generated path) in case the download software is doing something dumb with path handling?

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Are you running the downloader as a sandboxed/containerized app? (Flatpak, snap, etc.)? Those can have weird issues with accessing the file system due to the isolation they implement to try to make things more secure.

    This is the closest I've come to what might be the issue, but it doesn't necessarily bring me close to solving it. I installed using sudo apt-get install qbtorrent. I'm on ubuntu at the moment, but I don't stick with any distro for long. I've used pop-os, fedora, ubuntu, mint, kde.

    I needed ubuntu on this machine because I needed specific versions of ROCm and other packages which would support the 395+ chip/ chipset.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago

    If it's running as a snap, you might be able to configure snap to allow access; I'm not sure how to do that though -- I moved to Mint because I didn't want to deal with snap crap...

    Doing some searching, I found this reddit thread which suggests that some of the distro shipped qbtorrent versions aren't very good; people there suggest using the developer's PPA on Ubuntu instead. The developer's site includes instructions for alternate ways to install on various Linux distros.

    You could try uninstalling the version you have and then running:

    sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qbittorrent-team/qbittorrent-stable
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install qbittorrent

    if you're comfortable with the security implications of using their PPA.

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    • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (1 child)

    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.

    I've done this in Windows forever because unlike Linux, Windows apps have historically been picky about network shares (not all, but many, especially in the 90's). Linux stuff usually is a lot more flexible with paths, which is why I'm perplexed you're seeing this issue today.

    What's your setup? Do you have a NAS? What network access does it use/are you using? Samba? NFS?

    Some details about the setup will help us see where it's potentially going sideways

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 9 months 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).

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