If you try to access a headless Transmission daemon’s GUI by a domain name or server’s hostname, i.e. http://<domainName>:9091/transmission/web/, by default you will receive the error as follows:
Connection Failed
Could not connect to the server. You may need to reload the page to reconnect.
At the same time, you may still be able to access Transmission by IP, i.e. http://<ipAddress>:9091/transmission/web/ without getting any errors.
Cool Tip: How to completely disable seeding in Transmission! Read more →
Access Transmission Daemon’s GUI by Domain Name
The reason of not being able to access the Transmission’s GUI by the domain name may be caused by the rpc-host-whitelist setting, that is enabled by default.
To access the headless Transmission daemon’s GUI by the domain name or server’s hostname it is required to add them to rpc-host-whitelist.
Stop the transmission-daemon service:
$ sudo service transmission-daemon stop
Open the /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json file in your favorite text editor:
$ sudo vi /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
Add your domain name or server’s hostname to rpc-host-whitelist:
$ sudo grep rpc-host-whitelist /etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json
- sample output -
"rpc-host-whitelist": "rpi.lan",
"rpc-host-whitelist-enabled": true,
Start the transmission-daemon service:
$ sudo service transmission-daemon start
ℹ️ Note that you should edit the settings.json file only when the transmission-daemon service is stopped. Otherwise the changes won’t be saved.