Another Linux person can't figure out permissions - cannot record

[Mike-Denver]

Server Version#: 1.15.8.1198-eadbcbb45
Player Version#: 3.95.2

I really didn’t want to post this. As far as I can tell I’ve been though all of the hints, tips, and tutorials online. But I cannot get Plex to record a program. It will play live TV, but when I record, the scheduled recordings shows the triangle with exclamation point - message “No write access to destination.” The console gives “Failed to calculate available disk space for path '”/opt/plexmedia/movies/.grab"’: 2 (No such file or directory)" and is correct. The directory exists, but there is no .grab file.

Current permissions are

drwxrwsr-x 4 plex plex 4096 Jun 14 08:23 plexmedia

and the same for the subdirectories “movies” and “series”

I’ve tried the permissions 777 all the way down. I’ve gone through Chuck’s inheritance instructions. Although, when I first did the inheritance, the ‘s’ was capital. Now it is lower case. I’ve tried UMask=0002 and Umask=0002

This is a completely new system. Default Ubuntu installation with updates and extras. Installed chrome and plex. Currently I’m trying to find a suitable replacement for my Win7 Media Center system. While experimenting, I’m trying to record to the boot ssd. Maybe I should format my data drive NTSC when it arrives and see if that makes my life easier?

Thanks for any advice.

Mike

[pl_5309]

What are the permissions and owner of /opt?

[Mike-Denver]

Is that it??? I thought about that, but figured since it was root root, I shouldn’t mess with it.

Let’s see… chmod 777 reboot. Still not working.

Delete libraries in Plex and recreated them. Reboot. Same errors.

[ChuckPa]

If I can add here? ( think I was summoned? )

Start with the g+s and u+s (whichever you wish) at the top of the media directory. /opt only needs +x (execute to traverse)

please take another read.

Try my given example and play with it.

Automating Linux permissions using inheritance (Helps DVR)

Linux has a very powerful and convenient way of automatically setting the permissions of your media files as you add more to your media directories. Linux allows only one username and one group to own a file which is somewhat of a restriction. This can be easily leveraged to accomplish what is needed for Plex. An excellent application of this is when you wish to record with Plex DVR, allowing it to write directly into your library, while you retain full permission / control of your media. …

[Mike-Denver]

Thanks Chuck! Can you tell me what you’re seeing that says I misfollowed your instructions? I thought I did them all. On relooking, I saw that I stopped before making the “media” group. I deleted it all and started over and made a group called “media”.

ls -al /opt
drwxrwsr-x 4 tv media 4096 Jun 14 13:31 plexmedia

ls -al /opt/plexmedia
drwxrwsr-x 2 tv media 4096 Jun 14 13:34 movies
drwxrwsr-x 2 tv media 4096 Jun 14 13:06 shows

from /etc/groups:
plex:x:127:tv,plex
media:x:1001:plex,tv

The function from the Plex side seems unchanged.

Mike

[ChuckPa]

Has Plex been restarted so it pics up the new group information?
Memberships are not applied retroactively to “login” sessions (which Plex launches itself as).

[Mike-Denver]

I have rebooted the system after most of the changes I’ve tried. Does that take care of it or do I need to do something manually?

I have also deleted and recreated the individual libraries in Plex as well.

[ChuckPa]

This isn’t rocket science.

If you follow the commands, exactly as I typed them, you better come out with the same results.
This is simple SETUID and SETGID bits in the EXT4 filesystem in conjuction with the UID & GID picked up when the process (shell or PMS itself) is launched.

Can you complete my experiment and show me the console copy/paste output?

use:
```
paste
text
here
```

and it will come through perfectly as:

paste
text
here

[Mike-Denver]

Well, the short version is it’s working now and your directions were absolutely fine.

The longer version is that I’m not sure why it wasn’t working before. But if someone else is having issues, here’s what I did. Last night, I retired everything above and it still wasn’t working. I’d created new groups, deleted the groups and directories and started over. Nothing was working, and while I was looking for the sections of the console to copy for you, things were just getting weird. The console wasn’t updating. Sometimes it would show things and a minute later they’d be gone. So I decided to strip Plex and do a fresh install. When I removed Plex and rebooted, it kept showing up when I ran Top. I couldn’t find it anywhere, gave up and went to bed.

In the morning, found somewhere (I think it was Chuck. He has all the best info.) that I should not install Plex via Snap. Mine had come from the Ubuntu Software center, and was Snap. (And now that I’m typing this, I think I may have installed it twice. Once from Plex downloads and then again from the software center.

So I went ahead and stripped the whole machine and reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch. I ran the updates. I set up my storage drive in Linux according to Chuck’s instructions here

Using EXT, NTFS, or other format drives (internal or external) on Linux

This document is of primary interest to anyone who has connected USB drives or has media on other internal drives but user plex can’t access it due to Linux’s default security mechanisms. WARNING: This procedure will not work for SNAP, Docker or other container mechanisms unless expressly handled within the confines of the container. This procedure is intended for use with the dpkg package. We will walk through the steps needed to add these external USB hard drives and internal hard drives…

(Followed instructions exactly except I only did one drive - internal, and in fstab, only used the last line, changed ‘ntsf’ to ‘ext4’, and ‘ro’ to ‘rw’ in fstab). Then installed Plex from the website download using Firefox (nothing extra installed yet). I made no decisions when installing Plex and let the libraries default to /var/lib/… Set up the HDHomerun tuners. (Why does it take so long to download EPG data?) Tried to record and it worked perfectly! It was a simple matter to fix permissions and groups on the storage drive directories. Tried again and it still works.

I do have some other questions, but they belong in another thread.

Thanks for your help.

Mike