OLLAMA_MODELS no longer works

[asmrtfm]

setting the OLLAMA_MODELS environment variable (was) no longer working.

[ edit: A reboot resolved this, so closed.

• additional details:
  models were in ~/.ollama (ownership: 1000:1000);
  environment variable was accidentally commented out in ~/.bashrc before a reboot - so, unsurprisingly, no dice;
  uncommented line in .bashrc;
  re-login'd;
  models still not detected;
  killed ollama;
  . ~/.bashrc'd for good measure;
  re-ran ollama serve & ollama list;
  no dice;
  killed ollama;

then:

I tried making /usr/share/ollama/.ollama a symlink to ~/.ollama;

and then:
chown -R ollama ~/.ollama/models/... ;
ollama serve & ollama list;
same amount of dice;

also noticed:
at one (non-canonical) point, ollama failed to start from cmd line and yielded an error msg that, to me, seemed to suggest it tries to (re)generate the default directory upon launch - with something equivalent to mkdir instead of something equivalent to mkdir -p;

...eventually deleted symlink and rebooted;
seems to be working;
closed this.

OS

Linux

GPU

Nvidia

CPU

Intel

[dhiltgen]

Can you share the server log? This sounds like it might be a permission problem. Make sure the OLLAMA_MODELS dir is writable by the user or group ollama is running as.