Unable to Access Remote Interface

Hi there, I have recently installed Duplicati on my server and have failed to enable remote access to the interface. There are already some helpful posts on this topic, but in my case the recommended procedure (outlined below) has not worked. This is what I have done:

Host is running Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS

Download the latest .deb file:

wget https://updates.duplicati.com/stable/duplicati-2.1.0.4_stable_2025-01-31-linux-x64-gui.deb

Install:

sudo dpkg -i duplicati-2.1.0.4_stable_2025-01-31-linux-x64-gui.deb

Enable and also start the service (surprisingly this did not happen automatically during installation):

sudo systemctl enable duplicati.service
sudo systemctl start duplicati.service

Check status of service:

sudo systemctl status duplicati.service

● duplicati.service - Duplicati web-server
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Tue 2025-02-11 10:23:59 GMT; 29min ago
Main PID: 981336 (duplicati-serve)
Tasks: 19 (limit: 27459)
Memory: 71.0M (peak: 71.5M)
CPU: 3.816s
CGroup: /system.slice/duplicati.service

To configure Duplicati service for remote access and also clean up some of the annoying default values. Edit the following file:

sudo nano /etc/defaults/duplicati

Add the following to the end:

DAEMON_OPTS=“–webservice-interface:any --webservice-disable-signin-tokens=true --webservice-password=[my password] --disable-db-encryption=true”

Please note that I am well aware that it is not necessary to set the access password in the startup parameters every time. For those wondering, it is also possible to set the access password using the command: >duplicati-server-util change-password

Save the file. Then reload the service:

sudo systemctl restart duplicati.service

Checking the service status will also show the daemon command line parameters have been applied, or at least that’s what it should mean, the daemon can always choose to ignore them but we have no way of knowing that.

UFW is enabled on this machine, I have opened up port 8200 using the following command:

sudo ufw allow 8200

This is confirmed as working by checking the UFW status:

sudo ufw status

Which shows (along with other open ports):

“8200 ALLOW Anywhere”


At this point, calling localhost:8200 from a local web browser works perfectly fine. However, accessing the interface from another host on the same LAN using the server IP address and port 8200 fails to load a page.

I have double checked my IP address, typos, and other obvious mistakes. As far as I can possibly tell the Duplicati server is simply not responding to the remote request like it should be.

As a sanity check, from the command line of the server I can run wget on two addresses, one is the “locahost” and the other is the IP of the server, which shows that local works but remote does not:

wget 192.168.0.1:8200
–2025-02-11 11:09:08-- http://192.168.0.1:8200/
Connecting to 192.168.0.1:8200… failed: Connection refused.

Compare to:

wget localhost:8200
–2025-02-11 11:09:15-- http://localhost:8200/
Resolving localhost (localhost)… 127.0.0.1
Connecting to localhost (localhost)|127.0.0.1|:8200… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 1906 (1.9K) [text/html]
Saving to: ‘index.html.2’
index.html 100%[===============================================>] 1.86K --.-KB/s in 0s
2025-02-11 11:09:15 (148 MB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [1906/1906]

Can anyone please confirm whether I have configured Duplicati correctly? Any other suggestions? Thank you.

--webservice-interface:any looks odd. Try changing colon to = sign, as used elsewhere.

1 Like

Thank you! That was indeed the problem.

I went back to the primary source, and also searched more widely online, but there wasn’t any typo with a colon in the documentation I was following. This was well and truly my own mistake.

A very minor suggestion would be that the status message be modified to include the interface information. Currently, here is what the service status report looks like:

sudo systemctl status duplicati.service
● duplicati.service - Duplicati web-server
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/duplicati.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: active (running) since Wed 2025-02-12 08:47:05 GMT; 3min 1s ago
Main PID: 1322939 (duplicati-serve)
Tasks: 20 (limit: 27459)
Memory: 79.5M (peak: 80.3M)
CPU: 4.774s
CGroup: /system.slice/duplicati.service
└─1322939 /usr/bin/duplicati-server --webservice-interface=any --webservice-disable-signin-tokens=true --webservice-password=[my password] --disable-db-encryption=true
Feb 12 08:47:05 systemd[1]: Started duplicati.service - Duplicati web-server.
Feb 12 08:47:07 duplicati-server[1322939]: Server has started and is listening on port 8200

That message “server has started and is listening on port 8200” would be improved if it made reference to the interfaces that it is listening on. Something like “server has started and is listening on port 8200 on interfaces 192.168.0.1;localhost;15.64.8.2”. For example.

This is of course a very minor thing, but I think it would help others in a similar situation.

Sorry everyone for wasting your time.

Great suggestion. I have made a PR for that.