I’ve installed torrentflux on my linux server at home and it was all running fine until it seems that I decided I knew what was best and started messing with things. I had changed the owner of the users folder from www-data to my local login name.

The problems that this caused were that every time I added a new torrent to be downloaded it would fail instantly. Creating a new user solved this problem as obviously a new user was created with the correct owner and permissions in the user folder but me thinking that I had solved this issue then proceeded to change the owner of that folder too leading to the same problem. Took me a very long time to work out that due to changing the permissions from the default apache user to my own user was stopping the apache run torrentflux from writing data to my user folders.

Things to be learnt from this are that changing the owner permissions of folders is always going to end badly. Secondly, if you’re having the same problem as me then just remember to check the permissions and owner of your torrentflux user folders.

(No copyright material was harmed in the making of the post.)