Cannot Access (Some) Plugins' Web Interface

[mrtepes2]

Hi Everyone,

Absolute newbie here, so apologies for missing something obvious (I am certain of it). I have been searching through the forums and on Google for hours and cannot figure out what is going on here.

TrueNas seems to be running properly and I can see it on my local network, but I have been having a great deal of trouble installing plugins. They will not install at all if DHCP is selected, either if IPv4 is auto-configured or if I assign values. I finally managed to get them to install by leaving every field in Network>Global Configuration blank and selecting NAT when installing the plugins. That was enough of a headache in and of itself.

However, now that the plugins are installed, some of them refuse to connect to the web admin portal. Plex (port 32400) and Jellyfin (8096) will never open up the interface, whereas Nextcloud (8282), Sonarr (8989), and transmission (9091) will open the web interfaces without issue and seem to be connected to the internet just fine.

I have tried an absolute shotgun approach based on threads I have found and none of these have resolved the issue. I forgot many of the steps I have tried, but below are some.

1. Opening ports 32400 and 8096 on the router.

2. Using Portchecker to verify that the ports are open. No ports are showing as open, even for the plugins that are working. The IP address shown on Portchecker matches the WAN IP address of my router, leading me to believe I am not in a double-NAT situation.

3. Performed a Traceroute on another computer on the network. Only the router IP address fell in the private range, again leading me to believe that I am not in a double-NAT situation.

4. A different router. I could not even get plugins to download with this router no matter how many settings I tweaked, so I am back on the original router.

5. Assigning a domain, DNS server and a IPv4 default gateway in Global Configuration. I have tried multiple DNS values such as Google's 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, Frontier (my service provider) 74.40.74.70, etc. and none have made any difference, or made things worse such as not allowing me to even download plugins. Against everything I read online, what seemed to work best was to just leave all of this blank.

6. Assigning static IPs in the router. I don't know what I'm doing wrong here, but every time I try this, I lose internet access on my entire network. The only thing that even remotely seems to work is setting IPv4 to dynamic

7. Disabling DHCP on the router. This again caused every device on the network to lose internet access until it was re-enabled.

I 100% guarantee that there are IP address issues going on, but I am not sure how those come into play if I am able to download the plugins and connect to the web interfaces of some of them but not others, and I could not for the life of me get anything to function when changing stuff from dynamic to static, so I had to leave it as-is to get any kind of functionality.

Setup
OS: TrueNas Core version TrueNAS-13.0-U6.1

Computer: Dell Optiplex 3070 SFF
Intel Core i5 6 Core (i5-9500) 3.00 GHz
X1 8Gb DDR4 ram (another stick is on the way)
X1 256GB WD SSD (TrueNas installed here)
X1 12Tb 7200RPM HDD

Router: Archer C2600 - Settings Attached


If you're thinking "It could be this, but nobody is that stupid" I assure you that I am and that no suggestion is out of the realm of possibility. I appreciate any and all help!

 

[mrtepes2]

For anyone else who has this problem in the future, I spent several more hours and ended up fixing this with the following steps:

1. Reinstalling TrueNAS from scratch
2. Setting the nameserver and IPv4 Default Gateway in the Global Configuration
3. Downloading the app via NAT
4. Once downloaded, changing the settings in the app jail from NAT to VNET and manually inputting the IP settings.

The Plex app seems to work like a charm now.

 

[victort]

For anyone else who has this problem in the future, I spent several more hours and ended up fixing this with the following steps:

1. Reinstalling TrueNAS from scratch
2. Setting the nameserver and IPv4 Default Gateway in the Global Configuration
3. Downloading the app via NAT
4. Once downloaded, changing the settings in the app jail from NAT to VNET and manually inputting the IP settings.

The Plex app seems to work like a charm now.

Be warned, even though it might work fine, IX has said that plugins are only going to be available until 2025. By the. You will either have to move to SCALE or install services using manual jails, of which there are a number of scripts linked in my signature.

 

[homer27081990]

I want to add two some things:

1. My experience with plugins and jails taught me that a manual jail is not just better, it's better than linux docker in my opinion (for the adjacent use cases we pretty much most share). Way more "professional" and sturdy, sane and straight forward. I believe it is of great value to learn, as a skill.
2. Never use DHCP for any server. We (as a species) are not there yet. Maybe IPv8 together with a later implementation of ethernet at the 2100's will do away with the need for DNS all together (by using an IP address format that is human-readable by default and has DNS capabilities build into the routing stack), but for now... You need explicit control of the IP stack on your server and services. I know it seems like you add complexity by having to manage two interfaces (GUIs-CLIs, router-DHCP-DNS and server) for the same thing, but, in reality, you reduce complexity by cementing stability. Eg, even if your router goes crazy or gets hacked, your services will still soldier on with the same IPs you configured statically.
3. Always provide basic networking information yourself (IPv4 gateway, nameservers, MTU if you ask me...). In my opinion, letting the TrueNAS CORE server work without those parameters (and DHCP off, of course) should be considered a bug. If you had DHCP on, GW and NS should have been provided by your router.
4. Also, because I was in the same boat as you, your problem is most likely IPv6 related. In the SERVERS or LAN subnet, disable IPv6. Same on TrueNAS, unless you are very familiar with IPv6 networking.
5. In trying to solve your issues, I suspect you created new ones. Try posting your firewall configuration, as well as NAT, DMZ, NAT-PNP, UPnP, port forwarding etc...
6. Be aware of the MAC address issues that arise in some equipment that is not build for container use (mostly domestic modems-routers). When you use VTNET, you have a port with one MAC but multiple IPs. Some routers see that as a spoofing attempt but do not inform you of a block.
7. Also, also, while I know that nextcloud most certainly has issues with this I cannot speak for Jellyfin, but could there be a trusted referer - proxy issue? Or a "only serve to those IPs" issue? Nextcloud in particular, when you access it via reverse proxy, needs special config for it to work. I am not sure about accessing it via NAT-port forwarding, but I suspect there would also be DNS and TLS issues. Been there. Sorry, misread the part about nextcloud. Plex and Jellyfin... Both using transcoding HW acceleration, maybe... What do their logs say?

 

[mrtepes2]

Thank you for the effort, but my problem is already resolved per my second reply. I am definitely working on learning to install via scripts and setting static IPs per your advice to avoid future issues, but in the end, this particular problem may have just been an install issue with TrueNAS itself.

 

[homer27081990]

Thank you for the effort, but my problem is already resolved per my second reply. I am definitely working on learning to install via scripts and setting static IPs per your advice to avoid future issues, but in the end, this particular problem may have just been an install issue with TrueNAS itself.

I took the effort for future reference, because I am pretty sure that this was a jail network misconfiguration problem. They tend to snowball during troubleshooting. Been there...