Transmission daemon stopped working - owner or permission issue?

Question

Suddenly I'm having issues starting downloads.

I'm using : sudo service transmission-daemon (start/stop/restart)

I looked at /var/log/daemon.log and found an error:

Couldn't save temporary file "/var/lib/transmission-daemon/.config/transmission-daemon/resume/(torrentName)": Permission denied (variant.c:1227)
Unable to save resume file: Permission denied (torrent.c:536)
Couldn't save temporary file "/var/lib/transmission-daemon/.config/transmission-daemon/torrents/(torrentName)": Permission denied (variant.c:1227)

Looking at those dirs are both empty with the same permissions:

$ ls -la /var/lib/transmission-daemon/.config/transmission-daemon/torrents/
total 8
drwxrwxr-x 2 transmission        transmission        4096 Oct  4  2016 .
drwsrwxr-x 5 debian-transmission debian-transmission 4096 Apr  1 18:30 ..

Looking at the process owner:

$ ps -aux | grep trans
debian-+  1900  0.0  0.6  29196  5796 ?        Ssl  18:33   0:00 /usr/bin/transmission-daemon -f --log-error

Can anyone help? Thanks.

Answer 1

On a whim, I tried changing the owner of the resume directory:

sudo chown debian-transmission:debian-transmission /var/lib/transmission-daemon/.config/transmission-daemon/resume

That did the trick. Parent directory's owner was debian-transmission and debian-+ was listed as the user of the daemon. I'm not 100% sure why this fixed it, but things are back up and running again.