Fixing Download Permissions on QNAP NAS

Mon, Feb 4, 2013

General

I have a QNAP 419P+ at home that I use for all of my media, backups etc. I had been using one of the integrated media downloaders, but for some reasons the permissions were always set so that my Raspberry Pi (Raspbmc) media receiver couldn’t go inside the download directories. Now running the command set_volume_mode Download was enough to fix is in each case, but I wanted a more permanent solution. My solution was to create a cron that ran every minute or so such that it would fix all the media downloads as soon as they were downloaded. Now it is possible to just edit the cron on the NAS (with a crontab -e), but these changes were getting wiped on every reboot!! So anyway, the solution turned up on the QNAP Wiki. The trick is to add your cron to the crontab file at /etc/config/crontab, reload the crontab with crontab /etc/config/crontab and then restart the cron with /etc/init.d/crond.sh restart.

For reference, my cron line is */1 * * * * set_volume_mode Download which runs the command every minute. This may be a little un-necessary, but the script runs in a second or less and i’ve not seen any negative impact on the NAS.

As usual, if you follow these instructions, I take no responsibility for damage caused to persons, property, etc. You follow my instructions completely at your own risk. Bla bla bla :-p.

Leave a Reply