Thread: "rTorrent's user can't access 'id' program."

Hey guys, I seem to have the most terrible luck with seedbox torrent clients. My newest trouble with rTorrent is the error:

"rTorrent's user can't access 'id' program. Some functionality will be unavailable."

As it happens, this functionality is exactly adding new torrents and basically my client is unusable right now, which is pretty bad considering that I can't get my Deluge working either.



Any ideas?

Originally Posted by LateralNoise

Hey guys, I seem to have the most terrible luck with seedbox torrent clients. My newest trouble with rTorrent is the error:

"rTorrent's user can't access 'id' program. Some functionality will be unavailable." ... Any ideas?

At face value, this message is saying that your user (account) cannot access id.

So to troubleshoot this..
1. Confirm whether the 'id' program is accessible by rTorrent's user. E.g. login under that user and paste the string from config.php to command line.

2) Or it may be a permissions issue e.g. the web server or rTorrent can't access /tmp directory for RWX. Or the /tmp directory for rTorrent and your web-server are not the some. Perhaps you used chroot on the web server or rtorrent separately? So check those points.

The normal permissions for the tmp directory probably should be 1777. If they aren't use chmod to change them

Probably down to folder permissions. Make sure your users have full permissions on the /tmp directory.

Check out this link for more detailed info and possible solutions https://code.google.com/p/rutorrent/.../detail?id=459

I checked the config.php file but I'm nor sure what should I paste in the command line, there isn't anything of much interest in this file... The only mention of the 'id' program is:

$pathToExternals = array(
"php" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/php. If empty, will be founded in PATH.
"curl" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/curl. If empty, will be founded in PATH.
"gzip" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/gzip. If empty, will be founded in PATH.
"id" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/id. If empty, will be founded in PATH.
"stat" => '', // Something like /usr/bin/stat. If empty, will be founded in PATH.
);

Also, I chmod'ed the /tmp folder permission to 1777 but I still get the error in the rutorrent gui.

Okay it sounds like you have set the permissions for /tmp. Did you check them before using chmod? And if so, were they correct? You should also confirm that they are now correct. I.e. don't assume that chmod worked, use ls -l to confirm the permissions. Also confirm that your web server and rtorrent are both configured to use the same tmp directory.

The reason that we were looking in config.php was to discern where the id program was defined (as being located).
Typically it would be located in /usr/bin/id

So you just want to check that it exists and is accessible. So check what user rtorrent is configured for. Enure that you are currently logged in as that user and do something like..
$ cd /
$ cd /usr/bin
$ ./id

If the output wasn't intelligible or accessible or id was located somewhere else, you'd need to address those point(s).
It's all in the details. Never assume that something is correct when troubleshooting, ensure that you confirm each point.

Hm, I didn't check permissions before changing them but it seems like it worked. Permissions now are:

drwxrwxrwt 266 root root 12288 Oct 29 15:42 tmp

There is no id folder in /usr/bin but all of the 3 commands gave intelligible responses. I'm not really sure I understand the whole program 'id' thing, what does this even do?

P.S. Thanks for the detailed responses, copper. I appreciate it.

Okay, next time you should check the permissions before changing them. It would have been a useful datum to help understand what is going on. If you aren't familiar with *nix permissions, you can look at this link - Linux file permissions

But in short the leading 1 indicates it is a directory and a 7 indicates full permission (Read, Write, Xecute)
There are three groups that each have their permissions defined.. so you end up with..

directory/user permissions/group permissions/other permissions
So 1777, signifies that it is a directory and *everyone* with access to that directory can read, write or execute there.
1777 = d rwx rwx rwx

'id' is not a folder, it is an executable i.e. a program. It identifies processes; PID, more or less.

Thanks for the link, copper. That clarified a lot. I still didn't know what "t" at the end of the /tmp dir permissions meant but I changed them again to rwxrwxrwx, for all it's worth.
Sadly, this still doesn't solve the 'id' error and rtorrent is still unusable.

The frustrating part about troubleshooting is that success can hinge on an easily overlooked detail. Maybe double check everything you just did?

Since this is most likely a directory permissions issue.. in particular, did you confirm that rtorrent and your web server are both configured to use the same tmp directory? Ensure that you check the configuration files for rtorrent, web server and for that matter your server. Also check the permissions for /var. Check the path for anomalies. I wouldn't even assume that you know which web server is being used. Make sure you confirm that by using ps and looking for the active server instance.

$ ps aux

Other than that.. it's possible that the error message is spurious. I don't think that it is.. but you could quote the message and feed it into Google. Possibly something is corrupt in your rtorrent installation. Or it's dependencies. As a last resort, I would try reinstalling rtorrent.


--
The "t" is a 'sticky bit'. This isn't used in most systems anymore and is unlikely to be the cause of your error. But as your system appears to use sticky bits, you should probably change that back to a trailing 't'. It is meant to be a sort of write protect flag, to prevent the accidental deletion of files where you have multiple users. You can read more about that if you want here -
Linux file permissions (sticky bits)