[SOLVED] Couldn't find Transmission's web interface files

[tones]

I'm running Transmission on Jaunty Ubuntu. I was using the older version (1.5x?) supplied in Jaunty's default package library, mostly via the web interface. It was working AOK. So then I decided to upgrade to something more recent. (A crazy idea, I know.) I used the Launchpad.net repositories (based on this advice) and upgraded to 1.83. This, of course, made everything stop working. The web interface insisted that my IP wasn't whitelisted, and refused to read any changes I made to settings.json.

Despairing, I purged/autoremoved all of Transmission, and re-installed from scratch. Now I am receiving an even weirder message when I try to access the web interface:

404: Not Found

Couldn't find Transmission's web interface files!

Users: to tell Transmission where to look, set the TRANSMISSION_WEB_HOME environment variable to the folder where the web interface's index.html is located.

Package Builders: to set a custom default at compile time, #define PACKAGE_DATA_DIR in libtransmission/platform.c or tweak tr_getClutchDir() by hand.

So, what is the deal? How do I solve this? Is there a directory somewhere on my disk that I need to point Transmission to? Is there a phantom package I need to install that includes the web interface files?

The Transmission wiki helpfully explains "Web interface file locations tend to be OS/Distribution specific."

Any advice or assistance would be much appreciated. Thanks!

=T=

[rb07]

Start by looking what files where actually installed, assuming you used rpm packages do:

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# rpm -qa | grep -i trans
# rpm -ql transmission

The first is just to see all the installed packages that have "trans" in its name... just to make sure there are no surprises.

The second produces a list of all the installed files. Look at where the transmission/web directory is; usually it is in /share/transmission/web, or /usr/local/share/...

If everything looks fine... then something is really wrong since transmission-daemon looks into those places by default... you can try adding to your start script (/etc/init.d/transmission or /etc/rc.d/init.d/transmission) the line, near the top:

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TRANSMISSION_WEB_HOME=/usr/share/transmission/web

Of course with the real location.

[tones]

I've installed Transmission with apt-get, not rpm. Does apt-get have a similar "list contents" command?

[rb07]

Perhaps with:

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# dpkg -l | grep -i trans
# dpkg -L transmission

Obviously I don't know Debian, haven't used it for a decade at least.

[lembregtse]

In debian the files should be located at /usr/share/transmission...

You could use "locate" to find it.

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apt-get install locate
sudo updatedb
locate transmission/web

This should give you a list of installed transmission packages (eg: -daemon, -cli, -common)

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dpkg -l | grep transmission

This should give you a list of files owned by the package.

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dpkg -L transmission-daemon transmission-common transmission-cli

[tones]

Thanks, those dpkg commands worked. They revealed that the package transmission-common was supposed to contain my web directory, but that this web directory didn't actually exist.

I un-installed and re-installed all transmission packages, which solved this web interface problem. Of course, now I'm back to the same whitelist problem I was having before, but I'll save solving that for another post...

[lembregtse]

Could you maybe try the following:

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sudo /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon restart
sudo tail -n 100 /var/log/syslog | grep transmission

And post the output here? Or maybe you can see the problem there.

If I remember correctly the Debian/Ubuntu package delivers the following, /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json (root/root) with a symlink at /var/lib/transmission-daemon/info/ (something like that).

But it runs the daemon as "debian-transmission". Make sure the folders are chowned accordingly, and maybe try that on the /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json file.

I'm not sure of the exact names anymore because I'm building my own svn version from time to time. I run into the same problem though when I started using a different user for the daemon.

[Jordan]

I un-installed and re-installed all transmission packages, which solved this web interface problem. Of course, now I'm back to the same whitelist problem I was having before, but I'll save solving that for another post...

One thing at a time.

Glad you found a fix...