Shared HDD on AC66U keeps reverting to read-only

[voodooman]

I'm a long time user of Merlin's Asuswrt firmware on this router, and I've been using it mostly as an access point and Transmission server/NAS. This problem is particularly annoying and I've been putting up with it for far too long. Anyway, this is what happens - every once in a while a folder or the entire HDD become read only. I don't know why, I don't know how, but every time it happens I ssh into the router and set "chmod -R 775 /tmp/mnt/NAS/" (where NAS is the label of the HDD assigned when I first partitioned it with Gparted). The disk is EXT3 formatted. I should also say that this happens regardless of whether samba shares are open to guests or password protected. I'm thinking that it might have something to do with Transmission, but I don't have any proof. This has become especially bothersome lately because I have the HDD shares mounted remotely on my XMBC/KODI setup and when it reverts to read-only all kinds of problems start happening.

What am I doing wrong and how can I fix this?

 

[voodooman]

Bumping this, still haven't found a solution. I think that maybe Transmission uses read only permissions when it creates files, as it only seems to affect those. I've tried using chmod on the whole folder tree (/tmp/ and subfolders) to maybe solve the problem, we'll see... Anyway, if anyone has any suggestion at all I'd be very thankful.

 

[hardtotell]

Bumping this, still haven't found a solution. I think that maybe Transmission uses read only permissions when it creates files, as it only seems to affect those. I've tried using chmod on the whole folder tree (/tmp/ and subfolders) to maybe solve the problem, we'll see... Anyway, if anyone has any suggestion at all I'd be very thankful.

I had this similar problem and it was a bad SATA III to USB 3.0 cable for my SSD. What made it worse is that MiniDLNA would automatically try to rescan the media folder everytime it happened. So it would spike the CPU and bog down the router at arbitrary times. Just use a good shielded cable, or a different brand of cable that is rated for USB 3.0.

If you still think the problem is file permissions, maybe consider it could be the file owner? Here's how to change the file owner to be admin:root.

chown -R `nvram get http_username`:root /tmp/mnt/NAS/*

 

[voodooman]

Thanks for the reply, I ended up going another way, but maybe someone will find this advice useful in the future. In any case, I don't think it was the USB cable since I was using a USB 2.0 enclosure and I used a few different cables (for other reasons). I believe the problem was Transmission failing to remove read-only when moving files from "incomplete" to "downloaded" folder. The problem was sporadic, so I believe it's a Transmission bug. Anyway, I moved my HDD to a Raspberry Pi running rTorrent and now everything is shiny Thanks again!