Raspberry Pi how to change /transmission to shared HD

Ask for help and report issues not specific to either the Mac OS X or GTK+ versions of Transmission
Post Reply
DonJuane
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Dec 13, 2020 3:29 am

Raspberry Pi how to change /transmission to shared HD

Post by DonJuane »

Hi, I make my way around Linux by looking at examples and struggling severely. I have been using Transmission on an OpenWRT router for some time with a shared USB drive and decided to make the move to a Raspberry Pi 4B board hoping for some increased file transfer speed.. I moved the USB hard drive over to the Pi and installed OMV. Got that working and got my previous USB drive shared. The problem is that after installing transmission-daemon on the Pi, the configuration is not the same to the point I can pick up how to "translate the install" and gain the benefit I am looking for which is all the paused downloads picking back up on the Pi.

After installing transmission-daemon on the new Pi, I found a configuration file located:
/etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
Now I first tested transmission and it worked fine with the default pointers to the save destination of
/var/lib/transmission-daemon/downloads
/var/lib/transmission-daemon/incomplete

I changed these two in /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json to instead point to my OMV share image from the old OpenWRT transmission implementation:
/srv/dev-disk-by-id-usb-ST5000DM_000-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-7-0-0-part2/incomplete
/srv/dev-disk-by-id-usb-ST5000DM_000-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-7-0-0-part2/downloads
And this seems to work fine for new downloads to these shared folders.

Now my old OpenWRT implementation left a directory on the shared USB drive (previously using transmission from openwrt) with the separate directory simply named /transmission and it is located on the new Pi shared drive at:
/srv/dev-disk-by-id-usb-ST5000DM_000-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-7-0-0-part2/transmission
It contains sub-directories named blocklists, resume, torents, and a file dht.dat

I assume that this old directory from openwrt, described above and the /transmission directory somehow holds the information which would o allowing the new transmission pick up where the old one left off, but I am unable to make this happen.

Now to the best of my ability, I've discovered a directory on the Pi that appears to be a similar repository for the Pi environment, somewhat mimicking the old file structure from Openwrt, which is currently stored on my share in the /transmission directory.

This Pi version of the download directory is located on the SD card (as opposed to my old Openwrt HD). Pi by default keeps those similar control files that OpenWRT held in the /transmission directly only with Pi they are located at /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info
Sub-directories under the /info include blocklists, resume, torrents, and files dht.dat, and settings.json (which appears a copy of /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

Now the only place I can see this profile location pointer where it is named as /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info, is it is referred to in in file:
/etc/default/transmission-daemon which contains several lines including

Code: Select all

# defaults for transmission-daemon
# sourced by /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon

# Change to 0 to disable daemon
ENABLE_DAEMON=1

# This directory stores some runtime information, like torrent files 
# and links to the config file, which itself can be found in 
# /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
CONFIG_DIR="/var/lib/transmission-daemon/info" 

# Default options for daemon, see transmission-daemon(1) for more options
OPTIONS="--config-dir $CONFIG_DIR"

# (optional) extra options to start-stop-daemon
#START_STOP_OPTIONS="--iosched idle --nicelevel 10"
Now I have changed this line in attempt to point the Pi transmission configuration files to the old OpenWRT by changing this line:
From: CONFIG_DIR="/var/lib/transmission-daemon/info"
To: CONFIG_DIR="/srv/d/srv/dev-disk-by-id-usb-ST5000DM_000-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-7-0-0-part2"

The issue is with this pointing to the /transmission directory or share of the old OpenWRT implementation, the previous paused torrents are not loaded.

I have read these and I don't see how I might figure this out from the limited documentation. Any ideas???

Reference:
[Reference:
https://linux.die.net/man/1/transmission-daemon
killemov
Posts: 535
Joined: Sat Jul 31, 2010 5:04 pm

Re: Raspberry Pi how to change /transmission to shared HD

Post by killemov »

DonJuane wrote: Sun Dec 13, 2020 4:22 am ...
Now my old OpenWRT implementation left a directory on the shared USB drive (previously using transmission from openwrt) with the separate directory simply named /transmission and it is located on the new Pi shared drive at:
/srv/dev-disk-by-id-usb-ST5000DM_000-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-7-0-0-part2/transmission
It contains sub-directories named blocklists, resume, torents, and a file dht.dat
...
Now I have changed this line in attempt to point the Pi transmission configuration files to the old OpenWRT by changing this line:
From: CONFIG_DIR="/var/lib/transmission-daemon/info"
To: CONFIG_DIR="/srv/d/srv/dev-disk-by-id-usb-ST5000DM_000-xxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-7-0-0-part2"
...
Compare the PI and OpenWRT configurations. Why did you point your new config to ...part2 instead of ...part2/transmission?
Oh, there might also be a conflict between versions, the 3.00+ version uses the torrenthash in filenames where the older versions do not.
DonJuane
Posts: 2
Joined: Sun Dec 13, 2020 3:29 am

Re: Raspberry Pi how to change /transmission to shared HD

Post by DonJuane »

Thanks, I was trying to avoid wearing out the SD card on the Pi with the activity from transmission. After reading more on this subject during the past 24 hours and also discovering the various log files on /var, I now see there are numerous resources hacking away at the /var directory. Not only torrent-daemon but all the system resources dumping away at the logs as well. The memory card is getting hit multiple times per second, often up to 100/sec with appending the logs so it seems impractical to think the Raspberry Pi is a serious device to be implemented anywhere with it's default design of an SD card hosting the file system. I am going to try to figure out how to move the OS to an empty partition on my media hard drive. Then I'll move the old files from the old transmission to the /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info when it is running in not such a volatile memory space.
Post Reply