External drive changes back to root the moment I mount it (Jellyfin)

eobet · 2024-06-11 19:21:38

I have installed Jellyfin via Flatpak but I am looking at this guide:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Jellyfin

The drive I want it to access have its own entry in fstab and I'm also using gnome-disks to mount and unmount it during testing.

From the looks of things, both the chmod and chown commands recommended in section 4.1 were succesful, but I'm getting stumped at the following:

The moment I use gnome-disks to mount the drive, the mount folder in question changes ownership back to root and even with sudo I'm not allowed to change the ownership of the folder after it's been used as a mount point.

What can be done about this and to get jellyfin to see the drive?

(The path I chose is just /USB/ which I hope isn't an issue in itself...)

Trilby · 2024-06-11 19:28:11

What is the filesystem on the external drive? Not all filesystems handle unix style permissions. Some drivers for those filesystems will "fake it" as long as the device is mounted, but these are just transient settings.

What is the output of `mount` after mounting with gnome-disks?

eobet wrote:

The path I chose is just /USB/ which I hope isn't an issue in itself...

There's no technical issue at all with that as a mount-point. Personally I'd favor and recommend putting such mounts under /mnt/ as that's precisely what that directory is for - but this is a just a style choice with no technical / functional difference for these purposes.

Last edited by Trilby (2024-06-11 19:28:33)

eobet · 2024-06-11 21:09:27

Thank you for the information!

The USB drive is running exfat (hopefully this autumn I might get an upgrade and use something more suitable to Linux).

Trilby wrote:

What is the output of `mount` after mounting with gnome-disks?

To reveal how much of a newbie I am, I've never run that command before and there was a surprising amount of output from it... I hope this is the relevant line, though:

/dev/sda1 on /USB type exfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,fmask=0000,dmask=0000,allow_utime=0022,iocharset=utf8,errors=remount-ro,user=eobet,x-gvfs-show)

Curiously, in gnome-disks (and also earlier manually in fstab) I did not enter such a long option string... only the following:

rw,user,exec,umask=000,nofail,x-gvfs-show

Last edited by eobet (2024-06-11 21:11:02)

eobet · 2024-06-12 16:47:01

Ok, so apparently having the mount point as /USB/ was the issue.

Changing it to /mnt/USB/ made Jellyfin see the folder using the existing above settings.

seth · 2024-06-12 19:23:45

mount also prints the default values, the mount path relevance is likely somehow related to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Jellyf … ning_Guide

Please always remember to mark resolved threads by editing your initial posts subject - so others will know that there's no task left, but maybe a solution to find.
Thanks.

Arch Linux

#1 2024-06-11 19:21:38

External drive changes back to root the moment I mount it (Jellyfin)

#2 2024-06-11 19:28:11

Re: External drive changes back to root the moment I mount it (Jellyfin)

#3 2024-06-11 21:09:27

Re: External drive changes back to root the moment I mount it (Jellyfin)

#4 2024-06-12 16:47:01

Re: External drive changes back to root the moment I mount it (Jellyfin)

#5 2024-06-12 19:23:45

Re: External drive changes back to root the moment I mount it (Jellyfin)

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