For many years I have run my Plex server on Windows 2012/16/19 using the Plex Media Server Service and have upgraded 100’s of times without many issues.
However in the last 6 months or so, every time I run the in server plex update, and “go get a coffee” I come back and the Plex server is “Currently not available”, if I look into the (default) location of the install I always find that the “Plex Media Server.exe” is not there!
Current fix is to manually downloading and install the update package, then everything is running again, but then there is the second and the most annoying problem is…
I get a new “PlexServer” and an old “PlexServer” the latter “is Currently not available” (i.e. same Name) with usual options including to remove the old “PlexServer”!! The problem being is that all my favourites and pined icons across all devices point to the old “PlexServer” and must be removed and setup again, It’s becoming so I don’t want to do any updates as the takes many hours to redo!!
Have you ever updated the service helper app itself?
You definitely need to update it for the newer releases – particularly the 64 bit versions.
Your description of having 2 identities of the server sounds like PMS was started under 2 different Windows user accounts. All the settings, and the “identity” of a server is stored in the registry, under the dedicated User branch. The plex data folder with all the metadata is also by default in a user-specific location.
Maybe the service wrapper used to run PMS under a specific user account, and your later experiments used your default login account?
Yes I always check to see if there is an update to both and am running the latest service app v1.2.1.0.
But you may be right about the two accounts I run the service app under a service account so I don’t have to be logged on all the time, so this may be it!
So I guess the answer is to log onto the server as the service account only in future, or initiate the update remotely maybe?
I’ll give it a go next update, that may also fix the update failing issue if not will re post here.
