Plugins not appearing in GUI after 9.3 -> 9.10 upgrade :-(

[Joe Mc]

This past weekend I upgraded my FreeNAS box from 9.3 to 9.10 -- I previously had working Plex and Emby plugins installed...

I decided that I wanted to re-do both plug-ins, and I wanted to re-create them from scratch in the 9.10 plugin format, so I completely removed them by deleting them in the GUI, then I destroyed the 'jails' dataset completely.

Unfortunately now, I no longer can get ANY plugins to work through the GUI, even ones I had not tried previously. I get the same errors most people mentioned here, "JSON" and so forth, and the solutions I see resolving their problems are to simply delete & re-create the jails dataset, but I've tried that to no avail.

I do see that it gets re-created wherever I change the jails path, and files get created, but it's like there's an underlying permissions issue inhibiting the GUI from interacting behind-the-scenes, or something.

I was able to launch Plex manually by SSH'ing into the jail IP, and it seems to work fine, but the GUI does not know it exists and cannot start/stop/upgrade it -- the status shows that it's stopped, even while it's fully-functional. Odd.

Any ideas?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Configure your default gateway correctly for your jail. That should fix the json error you are taking about.

 

[Joe Mc]

Thanks for the quick reply, but that didn't work unfortunately. I should also mention that I can in fact ping the IPs of the jails from outside of the FreeNAS server.

I tried re-installing the plug-ins and I still have all the same symptoms, but here's some more info:

- after re-installing Emby, the "emby_1" jail is created but Emby does not display under Plugins > Installed (in fact, that screen takes over 2-3 minutes to load, under 9.3 it was near instant)
- after re-installing PlexMediaServer, the "plexmediaserver_1" jail is created and Plex shows as installed under Plugins > Installed, but always shows "off" for status.
- if I try to toggle the status to "on" in that screen, the GUI just sits there loading for about 3-5 minutes or so, then eventually still shows "off"
- on the nav bar on the left-hand side, the "Plugins" branch shows nothing under it, but of course both jails are there under jails and I can edit/stop/start them, etc.

I have the sinking feeling the next suggestion will be "re-install FreeNAS" but I'm really trying to avoid that... there's got to be some sort of underlying permissions or configuration issue specific to the GUI, since these plugins actually do work if I manually SSH into them and run the services by hand :(

 

[SweetAndLow]

Can the jail ping your gateway and can it ping Google?

 

[Joe Mc]

Yup.

root@plexmediaserver_1:/ # ping www.google.com
PING www.google.com (172.217.4.228): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.217.4.228: icmp_seq=0 ttl=54 time=10.580 ms
64 bytes from 172.217.4.228: icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=10.532 ms
^C
--- www.google.com ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 10.532/10.556/10.580/0.024 ms

 

[Joe Mc]

Well, it seems that I fixed this by disabling "VIMAGE" (under Advanced Settings) on the jails and restarting them. Now the GUI can communicate to all of the plugins without a problem, and they appear to be working!

 

[SweetAndLow]

Your network configuration for your jails was messed up if removing vimage fixed it.

 

[Joe Mc]

Be that as it may, I would love to know what, or how... I mentioned that I had tried removing all jails and plug-ins and re-creating them from scratch under 9.10, no? I did not have to disable VIMAGE under 9.3 for these to work...

If anything, 9.10 may not be creating the jails properly post-upgrade, or something behind-the-scenes is still stuck in the 9.3 way of doing things.

Are there any security or performance drawbacks while running a jail with VIMAGE disabled?

 

[SweetAndLow]

All jails will use the same ip and just be on different ports. There are no real security concerns since applications shouldn't be able to access anything outside the jail.

 

[raidflex]

All jails will use the same ip and just be on different ports. There are no real security concerns since applications shouldn't be able to access anything outside the jail.

You also can also specify a static IP for each jail with VIMAGE disabled.

 

[SweetAndLow]

You also can also specify a static IP for each jail with VIMAGE disabled.

Does that actually work?

 

[raidflex]

Does that actually work?

Yes I have a few jails setup that way without issues.