Guide to troubleshooting plugins

[Joe Fenton]

Hi,

Is there a guide anywhere for troubleshooting plugins? I can't get mine to start (Plex and BTSync) despite following guides. When I try to start them it just tells me there is a problem, nothing more. I'm new to the platform but quite technically savvy, but can't seem to find an easy guide that tells me where to start troubleshooting any issues like this.

I am also confused that I have managed to end up with a Windows share with data on it, that doesn't belong to a volume seemingly! Does this mean it won't be automatically mirrored. I am a bit confused how I ended up in this state and I'm tempted to start from scratch.

Thanks

 

[danb35]

I am also confused that I have managed to end up with a Windows share with data on it, that doesn't belong to a volume seemingly!

I can't really address your problems with Plex and BTSync, but I can assure you that your share and data are on your storage pool (or, if you've created multiple pools, one of them). Without knowing what you're seeing that suggests to you that it doesn't belong to a pool, I can't explain further, but quite simply there's nowhere else for it to be other than on a pool (what FreeNAS calls a volume).

 

[Joe Fenton]

I can't really address your problems with Plex and BTSync, but I can assure you that your share and data are on your storage pool (or, if you've created multiple pools, one of them). Without knowing what you're seeing that suggests to you that it doesn't belong to a pool, I can't explain further, but quite simply there's nowhere else for it to be other than on a pool (what FreeNAS calls a volume).

Thanks. Makes sense, I just thought a share would have to be directly linked to a volume, but it doesn't seem to to be the case.

As for the plugins. Nothing I install works. This probably suggests I have done something wrong with permissions in the volume, or something wrong with the Jails, from what I can tell. I need some kind of verbose log output to even begin to understand the problem though, not just some message saying it didn't work!
Where are the logs, and how do I try and install/run plugins at the command line so I can view output there too?

 

[SweetAndLow]

You don't install or configure stuff from the command line.

You should do this:
1. Delete all plugins
2. Delete all jails you created, only do this of you created jails not just plugins.
3. Delete the jails dataset if there was one.
4. Install your plugins, everything should start now. Now you know if you change something and the plugin breaks you know what broke it.
5. Create dataset for media, I call mine /mnt/tank/media.
6. Create a share for that new dataset. Note: never share the root dataset. I.e. /mnt/tank.
7. Next you need to mount that dataset in your jail using the jail configuration to add storage.

Hope this clears some things up and you will still have to figure out permissions but everything should be close to working.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

plugins should work without having to change permissions, it's probably not something you broke at this point.

usually what doesn't is the middleware layer that communicates between the plugin and freenas. when you run 'jls' does your jail have an IP? if not, I suspect this is the issue.

 

[danb35]

Thanks. Makes sense, I just thought a share would have to be directly linked to a volume, but it doesn't seem to to be the case.

Best practice is to not share an entire volume, but to create directories or datasets for shares. If you used the setup wizard, it would have created a dataset for each share. Further discussion of this subject would probably be better in one of the other forums, maybe the sharing one.

 

[adrianwi]

My advice, after playing around with FreeNAS for 12-18 months, would be to avoid the plug-ins and look on the forum for guides to set these things up manually. You'll learn a lot more about FreeNAS/BSD and have a much more stable environment that you can update and troubleshoot as required.