Transmission Daemon: weird problem with private trackers

[SantiJovi]

I've been using Transmission Daemon 2.82 embedded on my router for the last six month without any significant problems.

But since the last week I can't get peers from some private trackers and consequently I can't download anything. I can get peers from public trackers and the download speed is fine. If I use another torrent client on my PC I can get peers and download from these same private trackers without any problem.

The message I get from the private trackers using Transmission is the next:
Got a list of 0 peers 3 hour(s), 2 minute(s) ago
Asking for more peers in 0 second(s)
Tracker had -1 seeders and -1 leechers 3 hour(s), 14 minute(s) ago
Asking for peer counts in 0 second(s)

I already contacted the people who run these trackers and they told me that "from their side" everything is fine. Even another people using Transmission with these trackers told me that it works for them.

Also I reinstalled Transmission from zero but I couldn't solve the problem. So, I had no choice but to write here to see if you can help me to solve this problem.

Thanks in advance.

[rb07]

The way to debug this kind of problem is by setting the environment variable TR_CURL_VERBOSE and run the daemon on the foreground.

For example, in a shell window using the user account that runs Transmission:

Code: Select all

TR_CURL_VERBOSE=1 /opt/bin/transmission-daemon -f -g /opt/etc/transmission/config

In the output you will see (among the full log) the daemon asking the tracker, and the response (as HTTP traffic). The response will probably show the underlying problem.

Note: Please don't copy & paste the log here. If you have to show something, then just show the relevant message (preferably cleaned up to keep identities anonymous).

[SantiJovi]

I did what you told me and between all that came out, I think this is the relevant part of the log.

Code: Select all

started HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Transmission/2.82
Host: *****************************
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, deflate, identity

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Thu, 02 Jan 2014 23:59:50 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
< X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3-7+squeeze15
< Pragma: no-cache
< Content-Encoding: gzip
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Content-Length: 131
< Connection: close
< Content-Type: text/plain
<
Announce response was not in benc format
> GET /announce.php/4d822ec5f48546167f383761259ae496/scrape?info_hash=%9e%27%ef9cD%c5%cf%07K%f7%1f%c5%c7G%19%aa%eb%8e4 HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Transmission/2.82
Host: ****************************
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=1.0, deflate, identity

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Date: Fri, 03 Jan 2014 00:00:01 GMT
< Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
< X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3-7+squeeze15
< Pragma: no-cache
< Content-Encoding: gzip
< Vary: Accept-Encoding
< Content-Length: 162
< Connection: close
< Content-Type: text/plain
<
Scrape response was not in benc format

[rb07]

Yes, that is the problem, but there's not enough info to know exactly what it is. Perhaps you can see the rest of the response on the log.

The most common problem is that the tracker is responding with HTML text, which is not bencoded of course, and since the response code was 200 transmission wasn't expecting anything but the real info. This means a bug on the tracker, a human introduced bug, not in the code itself (i.e. respond always "200 OK", and then with a nice (stupid) html page with some announcement, like "Sorry, we are doing maintenance...").

[x1n]

Hi,

i had exactly the same problem with transmission running on ddwrt router. Also tried reinstalling and downgrading tranmission without success. The problem turned out to be the current version of libcurl (libcurl_7.33.0-4_ar71xx.ipk). After downgrading to libcurl_7.29.0-1_ar71xx.ipk everything started to work as before.

You have to:
opkg remove transmission-web
opkg remove transmission-daemon
opkg remove libcurl

download libcurl_7.29.0-1_ar71xx ( i got it from here https://github.com/gwlim/openwrt_wr1043 ... ar71xx.ipk )
opkg install libcurl_7.29.0-1_ar71xx.ipk
opkg install transmission-daemon
opkg install transmission-web

commands may differ depending on your router firmware/chipset.. hope it helps..

x1n

[SantiJovi]

Hi,

i had exactly the same problem with transmission running on ddwrt router. Also tried reinstalling and downgrading tranmission without success. The problem turned out to be the current version of libcurl (libcurl_7.33.0-4_ar71xx.ipk). After downgrading to libcurl_7.29.0-1_ar71xx.ipk everything started to work as before.

You have to:
opkg remove transmission-web
opkg remove transmission-daemon
opkg remove libcurl

download libcurl_7.29.0-1_ar71xx ( i got it from here https://github.com/gwlim/openwrt_wr1043 ... ar71xx.ipk )
opkg install libcurl_7.29.0-1_ar71xx.ipk
opkg install transmission-daemon
opkg install transmission-web

commands may differ depending on your router firmware/chipset.. hope it helps..

x1n

Thank you very much x1n. Transmission works perfect now with these trackers.

And thanks to rb07 too for try to help me. I saw your second answer yesterday before I go to bed and I didn't have time to make a second test or say thank you.