I wanted to use the Transmission-Daemon bittorrent service on Ubuntu to download files directly to my new Windows Home Server. This was harder than I thought, but only because I didn’t understand all the nuances.

First, the WHS share. Simply called “Downloads”, I made it a non-duplicated share that allows the Guest account full access. There is no password on this account. That’s all that’s required on WHS.

Now to Ubuntu. I tried editing /etc/fstab to automatically mount //whs01/Downloads to /mnt/downloads. This worked using my userid and password hardcoded in the fstab file, but then only  root could write to the share. I tried using guest instead, but the same thing happened.

Turns out you can specify “dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777″ which sets up the mount to be updatable by everyone, including the transmission-daemon process. Too easy, once you know what the problem is, that is!

The final fstab entry looks like this:

//whs01/Downloads /mnt/downloads cifs noatime,rw,user=guest,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777 0 0