When installed normally, spark box works fine and plays as normal when used as a jellyfin server. However, whenever I try and change my media folder to a storage volume made of 2x4tb hard drives, video playback and downloading now doesn't work. It seems like a permissions issue as qbit will not even download the meta data when changing the media folder to this drive. I have also tried mounting the drives to the standard directory and get the same issue. Any ideas?
9 replies
Chris wrote:
Good instinct — that reads like a permissions problem, and the fact it follows the drive rather than the folder is the useful clue. Start here over SSH: sudo sparkbox check-media-perms That asks the apps themselves to write into each of your library folders the same way they do during an import, and if any are blocked it prints the exact one-line fix — one that grants access without changing who owns your files. One thing that would narrow it right down: run df -T against that volume and tell me what the Type column says. If it comes back exfat, ntfs or fuseblk, Linux permissions can't be applied there at all, which would explain the standard directory behaving the same. — Chris
Crptacular wrote:
Interesting from this, the command says that they can all read and write to the media folders The type for the volume is ext4.
Chris wrote:
That clears the filesystem, and it is worth knowing that check has a blind spot: the part that tests from inside the apps themselves only runs while those containers are up. If they are down it quietly falls back to a host-side look, which passes on folders the apps still cannot use. Next step: sudo sparkbox up Changing Media Root from Settings only restarts the apps. The step that creates Movies/TV/Music/downloads on the new drive and gives them to your app user has only ever run on up — without it Docker creates those folders as root, so nothing can write into them. Tom shipped a fix for that yesterday in v1.6.465. Tell me what it prints. — Chris
Crptacular wrote:
It prints that everything is running and lists all the IPs for the various media centre apps. Problem still persists, downloads are stuck at downloading metadata
Chris wrote:
That detail moves this off permissions entirely. Stuck on "downloading metadata" means qBittorrent never reached a tracker or a peer — that is a network symptom. A blocked folder fails differently: the download starts, then errors on write. Here is how the drive change could still be the trigger. qBittorrent has no network of its own — it runs inside the VPN container, and repointing Media Root rebuilds that whole stack, so the tunnel was torn down and brought back with it. Run: sudo sparkbox status Check the Status column for sb-gluetun. It needs to read healthy, not just Up — "running" is not a test of the tunnel. If it says unhealthy or restarting, sudo sparkbox logs gluetun will name the reason. Let us settle downloads first, then come back to playback. — Chris
Crptacular wrote:
Gluetun reads as healthy. Problems still persist stuck on downloading metadata
Chris wrote:
Four rounds in and you are still stuck, which is longer than this should take — that is on us, not you. What healthy actually proves is narrower than it sounds. Gluetun fetches two HTTPS sites, so web traffic and DNS work through the tunnel. It never tests UDP — and DHT plus most public trackers are UDP, which is how a magnet finds the peers it pulls metadata from. Your symptom fits that gap. One test to split it: add an official Ubuntu ISO .torrent from releases.ubuntu.com. If that downloads, peer traffic is fine. If it also sits at zero, the tunnel is the problem, not your drive. I have flagged this to Tom. — Chris
Crptacular wrote:
Official ISO from Ubuntu is stuck on stalled. So I guess the tunnel is the problem.
Chris wrote:
That result is worth a lot: it clears your two disks completely. An official Ubuntu torrent has thousands of seeders, so if that one will not move, nothing about your storage is involved. The likeliest cause now is which VPN server you land on. Plenty of providers only permit P2P on certain servers — ordinary web traffic passes, which is why gluetun still reads healthy, while torrent traffic is quietly dropped. Surfshark allows P2P on every server; ProtonVPN throttles the non-P2P ones. Two things from Settings - Media Center, and that decides the fix: your VPN Provider, and what VPN Server Country is set to. -- Chris