Gfilui

Since I upgraded my ubuntu server installation from 16.04 to 16.10, the transmission-daemon service seems to be ignoring settings.json.

The symptom is that the web interface gives me:

403: Forbidden

Unauthorized IP Address.

Either disable the IP address whitelist or add your address to it.

If you're editing settings.json, see the 'rpc-whitelist' and 'rpc-whitelist-enabled' entries.

but in /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json we have, unchanged from before the upgrade:

"rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1,192.168.23.*",
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": true,

/var/lib/transmission-daemon/.config/transmission-daemon/settings.json also points to /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json:

jast@achilles:/etc/transmission-daemon$ sudo ls -l /var/lib/transmission-daemon/.config/transmission-daemon/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 38 Sep 5 12:56 settings.json -> /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json

syslog after doing service transmission-daemon restart (I think it should usually be also tellung me what ips it adds to the whitelist:

Jan 7 13:16:37 achilles transmission-daemon[4087]: Closing transmission session... done.
Jan 7 13:16:38 achilles transmission-daemon[5025]: [2017-01-07 13:16:38.552] UDP Failed to set receive buffer: requested 4194304, got 425984 (tr-udp.c:84)
Jan 7 13:16:38 achilles transmission-daemon[5025]: [2017-01-07 13:16:38.552] UDP Failed to set send buffer: requested 1048576, got 425984 (tr-udp.c:95)
Jan 7 13:16:38 achilles transmission-daemon[5025]: [2017-01-07 13:16:38.552] UDP Failed to set receive buffer: requested 4194304, got 425984 (tr-udp.c:84)
Jan 7 13:16:38 achilles transmission-daemon[5025]: [2017-01-07 13:16:38.552] UDP Failed to set send buffer: requested 1048576, got 425984 (tr-udp.c:95)

So where is it trying to get its config from now?

After updating 16.04 LTS, systemd would not load my config file for transmission-daemon from the correct location.

I found a workaround at: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=734467

I tried the drop-in *.conf file in /etc/systemd/system/transmission.service.d/ to override ExecStart. However, using ps -ef | grep transmission I could see the wrong config location was still being used after reloads and restarts.

Reluctantly, I edited

/lib/systemd/system/transmission-daemon.service

to include the correct path by appending

-g /etc/transmission-daemon

to the ExecStart line.

[Unit]
Description=Transmission BitTorrent Daemon
After=network.target

[Service]
User=debian-transmission
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/bin/transmission-daemon -f --log-error -g /etc/transmission-daemon
ExecReload=/bin/kill -s HUP $MAINPID

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

I've got the same issue since I installed on 16.04, while it was previously working fine on 14.04.
Check this out: http://www.htpcguides.com/install-transmission-bittorrent-client-on-ubuntu-15-x/ - steps #4, #5 and #6. Basically you need to modify the systemd script variables.
I know this is something that has changed from 14.04 to 16.04, so shouldn't apply to you if was working before, but is worth a try.