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

Question

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

by

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

Solution 1

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.

Solution 2

Debian users may take a look at file: /lib/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service to verify the required user is also set in that file.

Then, verify the home directory for that user because the configuration will then be read from ~/.config/transmission-daemon/

Solution 3

Empty file /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json invokes this error in my case.

rm /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json solves problem.

Debug hinit: sudo -u debian-transmission strace transmission-daemon -f --log-debug -g /etc/transmission-daemon/

Comments

[anonymous2]

Hmm, debian isn't really on topic here...

[Dimitri Kopriwa]

I use docker-transmission official image and I don't have /var/lib/transmission-daemon

[bomben]

Upvote, because this was new to me. My error showed Is another copy of Transmission already running?

[bomben]

This file says that the user running the service is debian-transmission but there is no such home folder on my system. Also, I did not create that user. I suspect it comes like this with install. I currently try to figure out why the wrong config get loaded.

[Admin]

I've the program installed to .config/transmission-daemon/settings.json and Transmission had somehow managed to wipe the file — resolved by restoring from a backup. I've recently upgraded to Fedora 36 if this had any impact.