Rclone as Service Prevents Access to Samba Share

When I mount gdrive with rclone manually in the command line - I get the behavior I expect:

  • Drive is mounted
  • Drive is accessible within Ubuntu
  • When drive is added as samba share it is accessible from Win10 machine

When I run Rclone as a systemd service - the share is visible but inaccessible

  • Drive is mounted
  • Drive is accessible within Ubuntu
  • When drive is added as samba share the folder appears but throws a permissions error when clicked from Win10 machine

I am assuming this is a simple fix but I cannot beat it. I tried running as different users and as root and also added a umask 002 to the mount but it didn’t help. The exact same command running in CLI gives me what I want. All the other shares I have set up in samba continue to work properly. It is only rclone that has a problem and only when running as a service. (Edit - This came out wrong - I know that rclone is not the problem, just my implementation of it!)

Here is my service - does anyone see anything wrong?

[Unit]
Description=RClone Service
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=notify
Environment=RCLONE_CONFIG=/home/plex/.config/rclone/rclone.conf
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount gdrive: /home/plex/test2 \

–allow-non-empty
–allow-other
–size-only
–dir-cache-time=2m
–vfs-read-chunk-size=64M
–vfs-cache-max-age 675h
–vfs-read-chunk-size-limit=1G
–buffer-size=32M
–fast-list
–umask 002
–log-level INFO
–log-file=/home/plex/opt/rclone/logs/log1.txt

ExecStop=/bin/fusermount -uz /GD
Restart=on-failure
User=plex
Group=plex

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

How did you try running as different users? Tried changing the User & Group in the service file?

1 Like

What happened when you tried the force options on the samba mounts?

force user, force group , etc… etc.