Plex obstinantly refuses to start

[chris pucknell]

Hi

Have been fooling around with plex on and off, but it often seems unstable. I had just gotten it working again, but after I restarted freenas, the plugin now refuses to start.

It refuses to start from the GUI, I have tried stopping and starting the jail, and restarting the machine.

From the shell I get the message:

Code:

Starting plexmediaserver.                                                      
su: pam_start: system error                                                    
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/plexmediaserver: WARNING: failed to start plexmediaserver     

I suspect there is a config issue, as I have reinstalled plex a number of times. But I have no idea how to reset the config or what the consequences may be.

Other than that I am at a loss.

Please help me Obi-one, you're my only hope.

Build FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201501162230
Platform Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G2020 @ 2.90GHz
Memory 7846MB

 

[cyberjock]

You've got only 8GB of RAM. You will have problems with plex. You need to add more RAM to your system (12GB seems to be the lowest end) if you want to run jails and/or plugins without problems.

 

[chris pucknell]

I had a feeling you would say that!

But um... while I'm waiting for the ram, is there anything else I can try?

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

that's not a config issue. did you change ownership/permissions of the jail/plugin datasets? that will break your jail to the point where no init script will run it.

 

[cyberjock]

I had a feeling you would say that!

But um... while I'm waiting for the ram, is there anything else I can try?

I don't. I've seen firsthand on someone's system that Plex wouldn't start. After he shutdown the box, added 4GB of RAM, and booted up the problem went away. Can't fix a "lack of resource" problem. As a lack of resources are damn hard to diagnose with certainty, I wouldn't waste time on it until you get the RAM to rule out that problem.

 

[chris pucknell]

ram is on it's way ;) hopefully that clears it up.

Incidentally, I did change my permissions recursively for the entire dataset, including the jails, to the user/group that works with my CIFS sharing. I was having trouble with permissions and this seemed to clear it up.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

ram is on it's way ;) hopefully that clears it up.

Incidentally, I did change my permissions recursively for the entire dataset, including the jails, to the user/group that works with my CIFS sharing. I was having trouble with permissions and this seemed to clear it up.

Changing ownership/permissions of your jail(plugin) datasets breaks them.

You are supposed to keep your files on a dataset that you mount into your (plugin) jail(s). This way you can change the ownership/permissions of these file datasets without touching the operating system & application files in your jails.

 

[SweetAndLow]

you should have several different datasets. having more datasets keeps things nice and tidy. You will never need to share your jails dataset and you should never share your root dataset. Having things in separate datasets lets you modify the permissions on datasets that get shared and not require you to mess up permissions that are on datasets that shouldn't be shared. Here is an example scenario.

Code:

Datasets:
/mnt/tank/jails
/mnt/tank/homes
/mnt/tank/media
/mnt/tank/backup

 

[chris pucknell]

Yeah sweet I've got my rig set up after that fashion ^_^

Uhm, so I have killed my jails default permissions. If I remake the plex jail by reinstalling plex, will this resolve the problem? Or do I have to change the 'jails' permissions?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Delete jail and rebuild it.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

Yeah sweet I've got my rig set up after that fashion ^_^

Uhm, so I have killed my jails default permissions. If I remake the plex jail by reinstalling plex, will this resolve the problem? Or do I have to change the 'jails' permissions?

you never want to change ownership/permissions of your jails/plugins datasets.

please read and understand https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/plex-obstinantly-refuses-to-start.27446/#post-176771

 

[nick779]

I don't. I've seen firsthand on someone's system that Plex wouldn't start. After he shutdown the box, added 4GB of RAM, and booted up the problem went away. Can't fix a "lack of resource" problem. As a lack of resources are damn hard to diagnose with certainty, I wouldn't waste time on it until you get the RAM to rule out that problem.

I guess its a YMWV thing, but plex ran fine on my system with 8GB. The system as a whole runs much better now that I have 16 though.

One thing I will point out is that I would definitely not use the PBI, and do a standard jail install instead. Theres a few more steps involved, but it seems to be much more robust and easier to upgrade.