Ubuntu – transmission-daemon: error loading working config-file. User priveliges

permissionsserverservicestransmission

Transmission-daemon has worked perfectly on a small headless server for a long time. However, it currently gives me the following error:

transmission-daemon Error loading config file -- exiting. (daemon.c:462)

Due to problems with permissions, all daemons are running as the user "robots" All config files are owned by "robots" and by the group "robots" of which I am a member.

For debugging purposes I tried running the daemon under my own account

transmission-daemon -f --log-debug -g /etc/transmission-daemon/

the daemon started succesfully without errors. From this I conclude that the configfile itself is OK. (I also tested this by substituting

USER=robots

USER=lars

The results remain the same; the daemon runs without errors. The config files in /etc/transmission-daemon /etc/init.d/ and /etc/defaults/ are all working fine when the daemon is running under my name.

I changed the permissions of the /etc/transmission-daemon/ and all the files and folders within to 777, and changed the owner and group back to robots. (because running the daemon under the name "lars" changes the ownership of the configfiles to "lars".

chmod 777 -R /etc/transmission-daemon/
chown robots:robots -R /etc/transmission-daemon/

chmod 777 /etc/defaults/transmission-daemon
chown robots:robots /etc/defaults/transmission-daemon

without succes… the daemon exits with the same error as stated above.

I don't know what I'm missing here, does anybody have an idea?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

Problem solved!

The folder

/var/lib/transmission-daemon/

als needs to be owned by the correct user, so in addition to the commands stated in my question above:

sudo chown -R robots:robots /var/lib/transmission-daemon/

Replace the user "robots" and the group "robots" to the names used on your system.

Related Solutions

ntfs Services – How to Use Transmission-Daemon with a Download Folder on NTFS File System

Well, looking at the script that is put in /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon, the user name we want to ensure has the proper permissions is called debian-transmission. Given that NTFS does not support Linux permissions, we have to mount the NTFS partition in a way that will let debian-transmission write to it.

We want to add debian-transmission to a certain group (one where you are also a member, obviously) and let that group have write access to the partition.

The steps are as follows:

Add a group, say ntfs-users.
Add yourself to the group.
Add debian-transmission to the group.
Edit /etc/fstab as per detailed instructions here.
You need to log out and in again to have the new group membership, as does debian-transmission (restart service), and the partition has to be unmounted and mounted again. Either do all of those manually, or just restart your system if that is an option.

From how you phrased your question, it seems that you are proficient with Linux, so I will assume that you can either carry out those steps without further instruction or find out how with ease. Best of luck. :-)

Transmission – Change Default Permissions of Files Created by Transmission-Daemon

You can specify a umask in transmission's config file (/etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json). Umask we normally represent in octal, but unfortunately, json does not support that, so we have to convert it to base 10. You can do this in the shell like this:

$ echo $(( 8#022 ))
18

That's the default, but you probably want 002, which is the same in decimal, so

sudo editor /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
# change "umask": 18 to "umask": 2 and save
sudo reload transmission-daemon # tells transmission-daemon to re-read the config 
                                # file. This is important, otherwise, the changes
                                # will be lost

Another thing. If you change the group ownership of the download dir, and add the setgid bit on it, all files created in that directory will have the same group ownership as that directory.

sudo chgrp "$USER" /path/to/transmission/download/dir
sudo chmod g+s /path/to/transmission/download/dir

It will not affect files that already exist. See http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Permissions for more.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

ntfs Services – How to Use Transmission-Daemon with a Download Folder on NTFS File System

Transmission – Change Default Permissions of Files Created by Transmission-Daemon

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