1.19.3.2740-add6f438d on UBUNTU 14.04 LTS keeps crashing at startup

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Server Version#:
Player Version#:plex-dump-files.zip (113.6 KB)

Recently a catestrophic filesystem failure forced me to reinstall the OS on my system (currently UBUNTU 14.04 LTS). Thankfully, all the data outside of /boot is still accessible. So I installed the OS on a newly-added drive, and mounted the old system under /oldboot. So everthing that was in the root filesystem (/) before is under /oldboot. Plex, for example, is under /oldboot/var/lib/plexmediaserver and its children.

Now I have installed PMS on the server. The new drive isn’t big enough to contain the 47GB plex content, so after installation I did:
> service plexmediaserver stop
> mv /var/lib/plexmediaserver /var/lib/plexmediaserver-save
> ln -fs /oldboot/var/lib/plexmediaserver /var/lib/plexmediaserver
> service plexmediaserver start

but the service won’t start. I have included dump logs that I hope will help us know what the issue is. What should my next step be? I found information that tells me where these logs are, but no information about what to do with them.

I’d appreciate your help.

2

The DMP files don’t help at this point.

First, can you provide some more info?

  1. SYSV init or Systemd ? Looks like you’re using SYSV-init ?
  2. grep plex /etc/passwd and get it’s UID/GID
  3. Now check the owner of the new temporary location. If the current Plex UID/GID doesn’t have ownership, it won’t go very far at all and will crash.
  4. Also, may I have a tar.gz or ZIP of the Logs directory underneath Plex Media Server ? This will tell me if your database is intact.
3

Thanks for your reply @ChuckPa! Ubuntu is an upstart system.

plex-logs-dir.zip (24.0 MB)

Before the rename steps that put the old plexmediaserver folder in place of the new one, I did:
find /var/lib/plex* -uid old-plex-id -exec chown plex {} ;
find /var/lib/plex* -gid old-plex-gid -exec chgrp plex {} ;

So now everyting there is owned by the new UID/GID of plex - or by root, as before. But I’ve attached a listing: full-plex-file-listing.zip (6.1 MB)

I don’t know what “the new temporary location” is but it’s probably in that listing I uploaded.

Thanks SO MUCH for your prompt attention to my post. Means a lot!

BTW: plex is 999:999 now. Was 122:131

4

I can save you a lot of pain right now but you won’t like it.

Upstart support ended in 2016 when Ubuntu ended it with the release of 16.04
Upstart was a one-release-only experiment.

At this point, I can only suggest you bit the bullet and take the full step to 16 or higher. I can tell you 20.04 LTS is both stable and quick. I use it now for production.

I recommend backing up (tar ball) that which is important (like the ./Library) from /var/lib/plexmediaserver then rebuild the whole machine from scratch.

Carrying over your system into a new, stable, and fresh installation is a “win” in more ways can you can count (1. no upstart 2. No upgrade on top of other upgrades 3. systemd, 4. current version runtime libraries (14.04 doesn’t work too well anymore)

5

Thanks, ChuckPa. This is the right time for such a move. I’ll give it a shot. I really appreciate the support.

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