[Support] Transmission docker behaving strangely - Experts needed please

[Kandinsky]

I am on 6.01 and after upgrading to 6 decided to start to use the Transmission Docker all seemed fine with the target directory being /mnt/cache/downloads both in the docker settings and in the transmission settings itself.

 

Strange thing is that all the files only ever were written to a directory called 'incomplete' and never in downloads. Then randonly both the incomplete and the downloads directories disappear with no trace of the files as well as the config director on the cache drive.

 

Any subsequent request to download anything now results in a "unable to resume file: no such file or directory".

Here is a line from the log file...

 

[2015-07-18 18:59:46.780 BST] Couldn't save temporary file "/config/resume/tvshow.mkv.eb483abd8b62b746.resume.tmp.qq2d4O": No such file or directory (variant.c:1227)

 

Is this saying that it's trying to write to the USB stick rather than the file on the cache drive?

 

It's very perspexing to say the least.

[trurl]

What are your volume mappings?

[Kandinsky]

/config  /mnt/cache/Transmission/

/downloads/  /mnt/cache/

[trurl]

/config  /mnt/cache/Transmission/

/downloads/  /mnt/cache/

Where exactly within /downloads are you telling Transmission to put the completes? If you are letting it put the torrents into the root of /downloads then you are going to have a lot of files and folders at the root of your cache drive. Any folder at the root of cache or array drives is automatically considered a user share, so you may be creating a lot of user shares unintentionally.

 

Similarly, /mnt/cache/Transmission is a user share named Transmission. Unless you have set that user share to cache-only, it is going to get moved to the array and will break your docker.

 

It is possible if you really know what you are doing for you to get those mappings to work, but I wouldn't suggest doing it that way. If you're not sure, I suggest you start over by creating a user share named appdata, then go to the settings for that share, and set it to Use cache disk: Only. Then you can map /config to /mnt/cache/appdata/Transmission, and you can map other dockers to use their own subfolder of appdata. That is the recommended way.

 

Where exactly do you want the downloads to end up on your unRAID? Do you really want the downloads to go to the cache drive and stay there, or do you want them to get cached but eventually moved to a user share? You definitely don't want each torrent to save folders or files directly to the root of cache.

 

If you aren't sure you know what you are doing then you probably have a mess to clean up on your cache and possibly your array. Let us know if you need some help figuring out what that mess is and how to clean it up.

[Kandinsky]

I have never used a cache drive before upgrading to 6 hence why I seem to have come unstuck.

 

1. Yes my intention was to have all torrent downloads either files or folders to exist in /mnt/cache/downloads, if this is not the correct way to do it as I also want them to remain there and not be transferred to the array then the correct config would be useful.

2. I assume I should create the appdata share for cache only and then have all docker related content in there? Any advice for best use of cache drive and the transmission docker would be very useful please.

 

I have found all of the previous downloads directories that have been moved to the array and either deleted them or moved them to a previous share.

[trurl]

You said you found the ones that have been moved to array. Did you also clean up the cache drive?

 

Create the appdata share and set it to cache-only.

 

For the /config container volume, map it to host path /mnt/cache/appdata/transmission.

 

Are you planning to use other dockers that might need access to your torrent downloads?

 

If you want to have a common downloads folder on the cache for other apps to also use, then create a downloads share and set it to cache-only, and map the /downloads container volume to host path /mnt/cache/downloads.

 

If instead you want to keep your transmission downloads separate from everything else, then map the /downloads container volume to host path /mnt/cache/transmission/downloads.

 

There are other ways to set this up. For example, I actually have my torrents download to a subfolder of a common download user share named Bin, and have my NZBs download to a different subfolder of Bin. I have that user share actually set to not use the cache drive so my downloads go directly to parity protected array. My volume mapping for the transmission downloads is /mnt/user/Bin/torrents.

 

But however you handle the other volume mappings, I do recommend staying with the cache-only appdata share for all docker config mappings, with a subfolder named for each docker under that.

 

Let me know if I need to clarify anything.