Installing games to local SMB server with Linux as host operating system broken

[Krillin]

So my boot drive is a dual Manjaro Linux and Windows SSD. I wanted to install my games to my NAS, since my boot drive doesn't have a lot of storage or the benefits of the NAS.

On the Windows side this works fine. Games install and run as expected. However, installation on the Linux side will fail or, if it succeeds, the games will not run. This occurs regardless if I'm trying to install a Windows game via Proton or a native game.

The NAS is a RAID mirror running OpenMediaVault and using SMB as the network protocol. I made sure to install the symlinks plugin, so that isn't the issue. They're both using the same credentials with the same permissions. The Linux side is using GVFS to mount it, and ostensibly appears like any other directory to the filesystem.

I'm a little new to debugging Steam, so let me know what information is needed to further debug this, like where logs are.

Thanks!

[Talby]

Interesting, you may have to ditch GVFS and go with CLI / mount.cifs, it works independent of your window manager so could be steam has a problem with GVFS. If that does not work, try NFS or iscsi, old-school reliability lol.

[Krillin]

Originally posted by Talby:

Interesting, you may have to ditch GVFS and go with CLI / mount.cifs, it works independent of your window manager so could be steam has a problem with GVFS. If that does not work, try NFS or iscsi, old-school reliability lol.

Thanks for your reply! CLI's probably my best bet. This is the script I've set Gnome to run on start:

#!/bin/bash

# A shell script to execute anything

gio mount smb://192.168.x.x/myserver &&
discord-canary &

What should I change it to so I mount it properly?

[Talby]

hmm probably best to remove that script and put it in either your /etc/fstab, or as a systemd unit -this way if you change window managers all is well. I am too lazy to copy / paste so check the archlinux samba page[wiki.archlinux.org] about 1/2 way down under the "automatic mounting" section, both are mentioned.

[Krillin]

Thanks! I tried it both in /etc/fstab and in the script, just to see which would work. What I used was
fstab:

//192.168.x.x/myserver /mnt/myserver cifs credentials=/etc/samba/credentials/myserver 0 0

script:

gio mount smb://192.168.x.x/myserver &&
mount -t cifs //192.168.x.x/myserver /mnt/myserver -o credentials=/etc/samba/credentials/myserver &

and neither work. What am I doing wrong? I have both in the script because I have a few places hardcoded to the location the file manager mounts to. I haven't tested this method either because only root can mount within a workspace and as a result Steam can't touch it.

[Talby]

may have to comment out the "gio mount" just to test - double-check your credentials file and make sure they are legit

username=value
password=value
domain=value

and you can test on the fly with something like this

mount -t cifs //ip/share /mnt/myserver -o username=user,password=pwd,domain=domain

or with sudo to test root with your linux uid/gid

sudo mount -t cifs -o username=${USER},password=${PASSWORD},uid=${UID},gid=${GID} //ip/share /mnt/myserver /mnt/myserver

so once you get it working manually then try it again with the gio mount see what gives

[Krillin]

If I run it as root it works fine, both the command and the script, so I'm not sure what the problem is. I tried different & configurations too, but no luck.

[HypersleepyNaputunia]

file ownership issue? take control of game files by your user account? idk

[Krillin]

Okay, I figured out why using /etc/fstab is broken: the drive is networked, and trying to mount it before the network is set up is what breaks it. I think I'll stick to trying to get bash scripts running anyway, they're slightly less likely to break my boot than messing with the /etc/fstab.

[Talby]

^ well just blame systemd :)

Thinking, the best bet is to setup it up as a systemd target (since it broke it, it can fix it lol) check out this setup[cloudnull.io] where it will mount the NFS after networking starts.

[Krillin]

I was able to get it automounted. Turns out there's a systemd service that can fix the problem. However, even though it has all of the right permissions (rwxr-xr-x, same as the local steam directory), it's claiming not to have execute permissions when I try to add it as a download directory. I also can't hoodwink it with a symlink, either.