Another post trying to set up an Ubuntu Server [External Drive]

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

Hello,

There are a bunch of these so I apologize in advance.

The Media Storage is an External Drive that was on my windows installation.
Currently Formatted to ntfs as it would be.
Looking through other posts I (am dumb at the linuxes) Set the mount point to /media/externaldrive
I added the UUID in fstab as
UUID=66D22E98D22E6C8D /media/externaldrive ntfs defaults,permissions,auto 0 1
as one post mentioned
I also changed the ```
/etc/default/plexmediaserver username to MY username instead of plex

I did a chown -R [My Username] on the drive at the mountpoint

I probably missed a step somewhere in any one of these posts and decided I may need more guidance than my ability to follow directions led me to believe.

I CAN Currently select individual folders from the external drive when adding a library at this point. However, when “Scanning Library Files” finishes, the app shows there are no items in the library.

Where should I start here ?

2

Not bad for a first step.

Where you made mistakes

  1. Used /media . This is reserved by the Gnome desktop. You wouldn’t have known. It puts things there so it would make sense but it doesn’t work when another user (plex) needs to access the files
  2. /etc/defaults/plexmediaserver has been obsolete since June 2016 when systemd became the Linux standard control process for Debian 8, Ubuntu 16, and Fedora.

Here’s what you need;

  1. Where to mount your media outside / away from /media
    Using EXT or NTFS drives (internal or external) on Linux

  2. Customizing your Plex configuration to run under your username
    Customizing your Plex configuration

These, and many more How-To’s are available here:
https://forums.plex.tv/tags/server-linux-tips

3

Thank you !

I will look through these in the morning and let you know what (if anything) I run into next.

4

Heya,

All the worked perfectly :smiley: Had some minor snafu with my router afterwards but that was a quick fix

Thank You !

5

Hi, driven by the philosophy, that you don’t have to be an expert, I figured out the way without Terminal-Commands and such - just GUI:

  1. Open the “Disks” App (gnome-disk-utility)
  2. Select your drive in left collumn
    • in my case “2,0 TB Festplatte”
  3. In the right collumn select your target partition
    • in my case I have my media-files in a separate partition “Media”
  4. Click the Options-Icon (cogs) and select the option “Edit mount options” from the dropdown menu
  5. Toggle off “User session defaults” and check “Mount at boot”
  6. Now you see the folder contents when adding it to the library

Notes:

  • This “works on my machine”, so you may need to overcome some hiccups.
  • Here it did not work immediatly, because the scanning took a while and my Browser crashed after high CPU usage. After I restarted my computer, Chrome crashed again (I guess Plex was still doing a lot of work with tagging)
  • I tested if VLC can still play my music files → works :white_check_mark:
  • After my third start up of the plex web player, it finally was running :white_check_mark:
  • Album Covers still where updating in the background from the artists profile pic to the actual album cover → plex really does a lot in the background :+1: :robot:
  • :de: :uk: German to English translated freely and may differ in reality :pray:

I hope this will help you set up your media-library on linux with external drives as a regular user :slight_smile:

Sources

6

Darf ich mal emphehlen ?

7

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