Torrents and Greyhole

[Workdawg]

I just got amahi going and many of my files copied over to my greyhole storage pool, things are going great so far. Now I've run into a little bit of an issue. Amahi is my first experience with Linux, but I'm a knowledgeable computer user in general, so I don't find it too difficult.

Anyway... my issue/question is regarding seeding torrent from the storage pool.

Is it possible to do this? I have my landing zone placed on one of the drives in my storage pool, as I'm using an old 20gb IDE drive as my system drive and it was filling up while I was moving files into the pool. When I set up the transmission app, I saw that it created the \\hda\torrents share. A fine idea, but I want to be able to appropriately file things I download into other shares, and keep seeding them. Most of the things I download would be in one other share, so I would be okay mostly with just changing the share transmission uses, but when I tried that, I got a permissions error.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[sag47]

I just got amahi going and many of my files copied over to my greyhole storage pool, things are going great so far. Now I've run into a little bit of an issue. Amahi is my first experience with Linux, but I'm a knowledgeable computer user in general, so I don't find it too difficult.

Anyway... my issue/question is regarding seeding torrent from the storage pool.

Is it possible to do this? I have my landing zone placed on one of the drives in my storage pool, as I'm using an old 20gb IDE drive as my system drive and it was filling up while I was moving files into the pool. When I set up the transmission app, I saw that it created the \\hda\torrents share. A fine idea, but I want to be able to appropriately file things I download into other shares, and keep seeding them. Most of the things I download would be in one other share, so I would be okay mostly with just changing the share transmission uses, but when I tried that, I got a permissions error.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Since you're new I'm not sure how comfortable you are in the terminal. But if you have experience in the Windows Command Prompt then it shouldn't be all foreign to you.

You can move the files and then create a symbolic link to them. You could also hard link them but only if they're located on the same drive.

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mv /var/hda/files/torrents/mytorrentfile.zip /var/hda/files/Docs/mytorrentfile.zip ln -s /var/hda/files/Docs/mytorrentfile.zip /var/hda/files/torrents/mytorrentfile.zip #check out the manual page for the ln and mv command, you can use q to quit the man page man ln man mv

For your particular case if both files reside on the same drive then you should hard link them (take away the -s option from ln command). NOTE: If you're going to hard link then you don't need to run the move command. You can just link it.

What is the difference between soft link (symbolic) and hard link?
If you were to soft link a file and then delete the source file then the soft link would be dead because it was referencing the file path. This can be similarly related to as the Windows short cut but it's more powerful. If you were to open a soft link in a text editor then you can change the contents of the original file. It's almost like referencing a single file from two locations but not. Hard linking is referencing a file from two locations though.

If you were to hard link a file and then delete the source file then the hard link would still work because it doesn't link the file path but instead is a pointer directly to the data on the Hard Drive. Since that is the case, be aware that if you were to edit one file, the contents of the hard link would also change because they reference the same data. They are both files but they reference the same data which is why they are "linked".

Soft link=reference by original file path (shortcut), depends on other file to continually exist, works across multiple drives
Hard link=reference by pointer to file data, doesn't matter if other file exists or not, must be on the same drive as linked file

You can list the target of a soft link with the following list command.

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ls -lah man ls

You can't list the target of a hard link because for all intensive purposes it is a file and not a shortcut to another file.

Heh, I got kinda carried away with explanation. Anyway hope that helps.

SAM

[Workdawg]

Thanks for the great reply. I'm actually a software developer (that hasn't used linux, o.0) so the idea of pointers and stuff makes sense. As for the terminal, I'm okay with it... I get the general idea, a command, some switches, etc... I just usually have to look up what the commands do when I see some instructions that include them.

A couple of followup questions:
1. Anyway, would there be a way to have amahi create the link automatically?
2. For soft vs hard links... I will have 3 drives in my storage pool once I get them all added. I suppose this means that I should have soft links after the move, since I won't really have control over where the files go once they get in the pool. It sounds like you are implying that a soft link is required if the file is on one drive and the link is on another, is this the case? If so, why?

[sag47]

Thanks for the great reply. I'm actually a software developer (that hasn't used linux, o.0) so the idea of pointers and stuff makes sense. As for the terminal, I'm okay with it... I get the general idea, a command, some switches, etc... I just usually have to look up what the commands do when I see some instructions that include them.

You can see all of the commands available in your system by running.
echo $PATH
Then running ls on each location in the PATH variable. Then running a man page with a command you want to know more about.

1. Anyway, would there be a way to have amahi create the link automatically?

I'm not sure, I just installed it yesterday for the first time though I'm not new to Linux. You would have to actually modify some code for it to do that, either from the torrent app you're using or Amahi. Most likely the torrent app so that it creates the link upon completion of the download. This would require man hours of development though and not something I would be willing to tackle. If you do implement something like this though I would recommend recording your exploits and reporting them to the original developer of the app. I'm sure they would be interested to know what you do in case they want to make it a feature.

2. For soft vs hard links... I will have 3 drives in my storage pool once I get them all added. I suppose this means that I should have soft links after the move, since I won't really have control over where the files go once they get in the pool. It sounds like you are implying that a soft link is required if the file is on one drive and the link is on another, is this the case? If so, why?

Because a soft link references a file by path. In Linux there are no drive letters (C:, D:, E:, etc.). The drives mount within the file structure and can be referenced by applications without them even having to know it's on a another drive (like /media/sda1/somepath). Since it is the case that soft linking references by path then it doesn't matter if it's on another drive or not because that is all transparent to the linking.

Hard linking is a pointer to the actual data from within the master file table. The MFT on one drive can't point to data on another drive. It's just not part of the design of MFT and it shouldn't be. That's why hard linking only works on a single drive.

The nice thing about soft linking is you can link an entire folder as well. You can't do that with hard linking because a folder is just an index location in the MFT. That is my understanding. Though I don't think Linux file systems have a MFT (just fat32/16 and NTFS) but it's the same concept.

I don't have much experience with hard linking because I normally soft link.

[Workdawg]

I've had some issues with greyhole the past week or so and after much assistance in that section of the forum, I've got it figured out. During that ordeal, I learned that the location of the share (the landing zone) actually keeps likes to the files after they are moved into the pool. This seems like it would be the ideal scenario that resolves my issue. I attempted to torrent a file directly into one of my share locations, but I'm getting a "permission denied" error in transmission.

Any thoughts on this?