[SOLVED] Another settings.json thread

[dgibbs]

/Rant

Why is is everytime I need to install transmission the simple job of editing the settings.json file turns out to take hours of my time?

firstly I stop transmission-daemon so its not running make my edits start it again and it overwrites the settings.
I somehow managed to make some edits and save them but cannot do this again.

What clever person had the bright idea to overwrite the settings file after editing the file? I'm guessing there is some reason for this but it makes installing the server SO MUCH HARDER!!

This is probably the ONLY issue I have with an otherwise brilliant piece of software.

I would like to ask the developers to reconsider this functionality to stop a major headache for me and many other users.
/Rant End

Im running CentOS 6 currently and used the contrib package as listed on the transmission website. The install goes great with the only issue being my settings.json being overwritten.
Any ideas how to fix this. Could it be a distro specific thing maybe?

[rb07]

Any ideas how to fix this.

Yes: don't edit settings.json (which is a last resort), make any configuration changes through a GUI: transmission-qt using a remote session, or a CLI: transmission-remote.

Also make sure you understand what your distro is doing, i.e. the specific files they add, like the start-up script (/etc/init.d/transmission-daemon), defaults (/etc/defaults/transmission), the user they (should) create, the security they (should) put in place, and maybe even dumb things like building a modified version.

And last point: if the distro maintainer screws things up, open an issue with him/them, otherwise its never going to get fixed.

[dgibbs]

Thanks for the reply.

I have already left a comment on the CentOS package maintainers blog http://geekery.blog.com. Hopefully he will pick this up and take a look.

I cannot use the GUI as my server does not use one. So I have no option but to use the settings.json file. transmission-daemon is meant to be for headless use so I should be able to fully configure it from config files (which is how you edit all other daemon services in Linux)

transmission-remote is not going to work as my issue is that I cannot access the server remotely because I cant change the setting to do so.

I still do not know why transmission developers think its a good idea to overwrite a config file. I don't know of any other services that do that. For example I regularly look after postfix and samba on live servers. It would be a complete nightmare to work with services on a daily basis that do this. With samba I can just make the edit and use reload and it would carry on without the service even going offline.

[dgibbs]

YAY!!! Got it to work!

In /etc/init.d/transmission-daemon file I found that there was as DAEMON-SETTINGS variable what was forcing some settings and this is why some setting would change and not others. So this sorted the settings.json overwriting issue.

I then found that even with the settings now correct I was still unable to get this working. Then I thought....firewall. The iptables firewall was enabled and I forgot to turn it off. So I turned it off and it worked.

So problem solved. In the end I was just me being a n00b ouphs. Live and learn I guess

Hopefully someone who is having the same issue will see this thread and not make the same mistake and some others can just have a laugh at my expense

[mspallacci]

Why do you tell iptables is the source of the problem?

I think it's a matter of configuration:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13725#p61706