Monday, 29 March 2010

FreeNAS Magic Sauce: Getting Transmission to play nice with Samba

I love my FreeNAS setup. I can download torrents on it faster than with my Windows boxes and it's about as close to "set it and forget it" as it gets. Love it.
I did have one problem though. From some reason transmission got in the habit of downloading files with permissions that let me read them but not write or modify. It would get worse if I tried to move them around via Samba.
As I'm not keen on running scripts to constantly do the same thing (like reset permissions) over and over again with little regard for what they're doing I found another solution. Tell Samba how to behave!
Adding these commands to the "Auxillary Parameters" of the CIFS/SMB config will make all your problems go away. Is it secure? Probably not. Is my network secure? Yes. Good.
force group = wheel
force user = transmission
Bounce the service and you'll never have permission problems again! :)