.README.md

Transmission on SmartOS

Please Note: This documentation is a first draft and is missing a lot of nuance. Running transmission as root on a public server is dangerous, be advised.

Introduction

Documentation on installing and setting up Transmission on a SmartOS minimal-64 15.1.1 zone.

Prerequisites

Make sure to copy the following line by line and confirm that each runs successfully. All of the following are run from the root shell.

pkgin -fy up
pkgin -y fug
pkgin -y in transmission
sed -i.bak 's/^TZ=.*$/TZ=America\/Los_Angeles/' /etc/default/init
mkdir /opt/local/etc/transmission

Installation

transmission-daemon -f -g /opt/local/etc/transmission

At this point Transmission should be running in the foreground. Following are instructions for getting the SMF service up and running. Test the server by seeing if the web interface is accessible using the information below. Then press CTRL+c to exit the process.

Install SMF Service

Perform the following from the root account to turn transmission into a managed service.

curl -sk https://gist.githubusercontent.com/baetheus/995c6aa07666afb5ce9d/raw/transmission.xml > $HOME/transmission.xml
svccfg import $HOME/transmission.xml
svcadm enable transmission

Accessibility

The service should now be available at http://<hostname/ip>:9091

Configuration is located at /opt/local/etc/transmission/settings.json.

Commentary

Since I run each of my services on their own zone with a static ip and dns configuration, I like to change the port binding to 80 on my internal home network. Thus, the net_privaddr privilege has been added to the service to allow binding to privileged ports. Additionally, if you're like me and are running your media server on smartos or another illumos derivative, you might want to look into using lofs to map your media filesystem to multiple zones. This is the reason for manually picking uid and gid for the head user and group. Feel free to contact me if you have questions on this process. Or hit up #smartos on the Freenode irc network.

Changelog

20150728

• Fixed the smf manifest to properly handle how transmission-daemon forks.

20150727

• Initial Gist

transmission.xml

<?xml version='1.0'?>
<!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM '/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1'>
<service_bundle type='manifest' name='export'>
  <service name='site/transmission' type='service' version='0'>
    <create_default_instance enabled='true'/>
    <dependency name='network' grouping='require_all' restart_on='error' type='service'>
      <service_fmri value='svc:/milestone/network:default'/>
    </dependency>
    <dependency name='filesystem' grouping='require_all' restart_on='error' type='service'>
      <service_fmri value='svc:/system/filesystem/local'/>
    </dependency>
    <exec_method name='start' type='method' exec='/opt/local/bin/transmission-daemon -f -g /opt/local/etc/transmission' timeout_seconds='0'>
      <method_context>
        <method_credential user='root' group='root'/>
        <method_environment>
          <envvar name='PATH' value='/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin'/>
        </method_environment>
      </method_context>
    </exec_method>
    <exec_method name='stop' type='method' exec=':kill' timeout_seconds='60'/>
    <property_group name='startd' type='framework'>
      <propval name='ignore_error' type='astring' value='core,signal'/>
      <propval name='duration' type='astring' value='child'/>
    </property_group>
    <stability value='Evolving'/>
    <template>
      <common_name>
        <loctext xml:lang='C'>Transmission</loctext>
      </common_name>
    </template>
  </service>
</service_bundle>