Permissions issues?

Troubleshooting
1

Creating a bug report/issue

I have searched the existing open and closed issues

I am experiencing 2 problems and I’m unsure if they’re related but as far as I can tell they started happening at the same time.

  • My mounted drive’s permissions keep getting reset
  • My jellyfin plugins configurations will not save

Required Information

  • DietPi version
❯ cat /boot/dietpi/.version 
G_DIETPI_VERSION_CORE=9
G_DIETPI_VERSION_SUB=19
G_DIETPI_VERSION_RC=2
G_GITBRANCH='master'
G_GITOWNER='MichaIng'
  • Distro version
echo $G_DISTRO_NAME $G_RASPBIAN
  • Kernel version
❯ uname --all
Linux Tui 6.12.47+rpt-rpi-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 1:6.12.47-1+rpt1~bookworm (2025-09-16) aarch64 GNU/Linux
  • Architecture
❯ dpkg --print-architecture
arm64
  • SBC model RPi4 (echo $G_HW_MODEL_NAME → blank)
  • Power supply used unknown
  • SD card used unknown

Additional Information (if applicable)

Something keeps changing my file permissions on my mounted drive and all subdirectories to 99 / users and it’s breaking permissions for my services

❯ ls -l /mnt/drive
total 56
drwxrwsr-x+ 10 99 users  4096 Dec  6 01:54 Anime
drwxrwsr-x+  2 99 users 16384 Aug  4  2022 lost+found
drwxrwsr-x+ 28 99 users  4096 Dec  6 01:54 movies
drwxrwsr-x+  2 99 users  4096 Sep 22  2022 other
drwxrwsr-x+ 22 99 users  4096 Dec  9 00:16 television
drwxrwsr-x+  5 99 users  4096 Dec  9 00:14 temp

When I save my jellyfin settings, one directory gets the new saved file but the other does not

❯ ls -l /mnt/dietpi_userdata/jellyfin/plugins/configurations/
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 jellyfin jellyfin 3899 Dec  9 01:59 IntroSkipper.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 jellyfin jellyfin  299 Dec  9 01:59 Jellyfin.Plugin.MusicBrainz.xml
-rw-r--r-- 1 jellyfin jellyfin  565 Dec  9 01:59 Jellyfin.Plugin.Tmdb.xml
❯ ls -l /mnt/dietpi_userdata/jellyfin/data/plugins
total 0

Steps to reproduce

the mounted subdirectories just intermittently change, some times it happens on reboot and sometimes it seems to happen later

Expected behaviour

I run these

sudo chown -R jellyfin:jellyfin /mnt/drive
sudo chmod 2775 /mnt/drive
sudo find /mnt/drive-type d -exec chmod 2775 {} +
sudo setfacl -R -m g:jellyfin:rwx /mnt/drive
sudo setfacl -d -m g:jellyfin:rwx /mnt/drive

file permissions should change?

For jellyfin, when i save settings, they should be saved to both
/mnt/dietpi_userdata/jellyfin/plugins/configurations/
/mnt/dietpi_userdata/jellyfin/data/plugins

Actual behaviour

  • mounted drive permissions get reset
  • jellyfin settings only save to /mnt/dietpi_userdata/jellyfin/plugins/configurations/ and they get deleted upon jellyfin restarting (which is expected behaviour for jellyfin I believe)

Extra details

  • As far as I can tell jellyfin has all the permissions it needs for the plugin directories

Here is my fstab

❯ cat /etc/fstab
# You can use "dietpi-drive_manager" to setup mounts.
# NB: It overwrites and re-creates physical drive mount entries on use.
#----------------------------------------------------------------
# NETWORK
#----------------------------------------------------------------


#----------------------------------------------------------------
# TMPFS
#----------------------------------------------------------------
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=1922M,noatime,lazytime,nodev,nosuid,mode=1777

#----------------------------------------------------------------
# MISC: ecryptfs, vboxsf, glusterfs, mergerfs, bind, Btrfs subvolume
#----------------------------------------------------------------


#----------------------------------------------------------------
# SWAP SPACE
#----------------------------------------------------------------


#----------------------------------------------------------------
# PHYSICAL DRIVES
#----------------------------------------------------------------
PARTUUID=28a6ec92-02 / ext4 noatime,lazytime,rw 0 1
PARTUUID=28a6ec92-01 /boot/firmware vfat noatime,lazytime,rw 0 2
UUID=92a6518d-ef2a-4442-9de1-84e3fdba5c60 /mnt/drive ext4 noatime,lazytime,rw,noauto,x-systemd.automount
1 Like
2

Hello and welcome to the forum.

Interesting behaviour, by default die default mount options include acl, I just did a quick check:

root@RPi4:~# tune2fs -l /dev/sdb1 | grep "Default mount options"
Default mount options:    user_xattr acl

Can you post the output of

mount | grep /mnt/drive
getfacl /mnt/drive

This is expected, one dir is for the configs and the other only for the plugin data, not for configs.

3

just by any chance, did you connect this drive to a different computer?

4

Thank you! :smiley:

❯ mount | grep /mnt/drive
/dev/sda1 on /mnt/drive type ext4 (rw,noatime,lazytime,x-systemd.automount)
❯ getfacl /mnt/drive

getfacl: Removing leading '/' from absolute path names
# file: mnt/drive
# owner: jellyfin
# group: jellyfin
# flags: -s-
user::rwx
group::rwx
group:jellyfin:rwx
mask::rwx
other::r-x
default:user::rwx
default:group::rwx
default:group:jellyfin:rwx
default:mask::rwx
default:other::r-x

Yes some time in july I would’ve used it with my windows laptop but accessing the drive through WSL

5

Well, it’s mysterious. Maybe you have to specify the acl option in the fstab? But you said it worked before until now?

Do you have any user with this ID?

getent passwd 99
getent group 99

Let’s have a look who or what is resetting the permissions

journalctl -b --no-pager | grep -E 'sda1|/mnt/drive|chown|mount' -n

And we can also check when it happend

find /mnt/drive -maxdepth 2 -printf '%C@ %p\n' \
 | sort -n \
 | tail -n 20 \
 | awk '{cmd="date -d @"$1" \"+%F %T\""; cmd | getline d; close(cmd); print d, $2}'
6

As far as I can see, you have a user ID 99. So I did some Google search and asking ChatGPT on what this could be. Sometimes UID 99 is related to Docker container image or to a nfsnobody user used on NFS shares.

7

It looks like your issues might be related to how the mounted drive is being managed by DietPi. If the drive is remounted automatically, any permissions set manually with chown or chmod can get reset depending on the mount options or the filesystem type. One approach is to check the mount options in dietpi-drive_manager or /etc/fstab and make sure you set uid, gid, and umask for the drive so Jellyfin keeps the correct access. Some network or external drives also require setting the ACLs at mount time to persist correctly. For Jellyfin, the behavior you’re seeing with the data/plugins folder is expected. That folder is often regenerated on start, so only the plugins/configurations directory is meant for persistent edits. Using the correct uid and gid on the mounted drive should prevent it from resetting and allow Jellyfin to save plugins reliably. Double-check the filesystem type and consider adding persistent mount options in fstab or via dietpi-drive_manager to enforce the ownership and permissions on boot.

8 
UUID=92a6518d-ef2a-4442-9de1-84e3fdba5c60 /mnt/drive ext4 noatime,lazytime,rw,noauto,x-systemd.automount

He’s using ACL and my understanding is, that on ext4 ACL settings are permanent and are reapplied on remount, it’s a default mount option and does not need to be applied in the fstab.
Same for permissions: it’s ext4, they are stored on the filesystem? I never experienced lost permissions after remount, on ext4.

For NTFS and exFAT your assumption might be true.