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I can't upload files after updating to 0.6.1

Issue

  • Can no longer upload files after upgrading my PoC environment to 0.6.1.

Environment

  • Ubuntu 20.04
  • Element Enterprise Installer 0.6.1

Resolution

To resolve this issue, recursively change the permissions of the directory configured in parameters.yml as media_host_data_path. For this example, in paramters.yml, we have:

media_host_data_path: "/mnt/data"

and a quick ls on this path shows the 991 ownership:

$ ls -l /mnt/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 991 991 4096 Apr 27 13:20 data

To fix this, run:

sudo chown 10991:991 -R /mnt/data

afterwards, ls should show the 10991 ownership:

$ ls -l /mnt/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 10991 991 4096 Apr 27 13:20 data

and now you should be able to upload files again.

Root Cause

In this case, the installation started with 0.5.3 and in 0.6.0, we changed the UIDs that synapse runs as in order to avoid conflicting with any potential system UID. Previously, the UID was 991, but we moved to 10991. As such, this breaks permissions on the existing synapse_media directory.

You may see an error similar to this one in your synapse logs, which can be obtained by running kubectl logs -n element-onprem instance-synapse-main-0:

2022-04-27 13:28:02,521 - synapse.http.server - 100 - ERROR - POST-59388 - Failed handle request via 'UploadResource': <XForwardedForRequest at 0x7f9aa49f9e20 method='POST' uri='/_matrix/media/r0/upload' clientproto='HTTP/1.1' site='8008'>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/synapse/http/server.py", line 269, in _async_render_wrapper
    callback_return = await self._async_render(request)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/synapse/http/server.py", line 297, in _async_render
    callback_return = await raw_callback_return
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/synapse/rest/media/v1/upload_resource.py", line 96, in _async_render_POST
    content_uri = await self.media_repo.create_content(
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/synapse/rest/media/v1/media_repository.py", line 178, in create_content
    fname = await self.media_storage.store_file(content, file_info)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/synapse/rest/media/v1/media_storage.py", line 92, in store_file
    with self.store_into_file(file_info) as (f, fname, finish_cb):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/contextlib.py", line 119, in __enter__
    return next(self.gen)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/synapse/rest/media/v1/media_storage.py", line 135, in store_into_file
    os.makedirs(dirname, exist_ok=True)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/os.py", line 215, in makedirs
    makedirs(head, exist_ok=exist_ok)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.9/os.py", line 225, in makedirs
    mkdir(name, mode)
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/media/media_store/local_content/PQ'
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