Be sure to set /etc/hostname correctly for plexmediaserver install

General Discussions
1

Adding this so hopefully it shows up in Google Search for some other poor soul.

I had installed plexmediaserver on Ubuntu 20.04 running in a VM on esxi, and after installation, I pointed my browser to http://plex.lan:32400/ rater than http://localhost:32400/ or http://127.0.0.1:32400/. The hostname is important here.

The symptom of my problem is that I couldn’t add media files to the server, and there was no indication of what was wrong. All I could see a button to install plex media server, and I was going insane thinking, “I’m literally connected to you!”

Browsing through logs, I got an indication that incoming request for plex.lan were being treated as being outside of the lan. I connected two-and-two together, and changed my /etc/hostname file from ‘plex’ to ‘plex.lan’, restarted everything, and it worked.

Burned through a few hours on this. May this post prevent someone from the same.

2

The documentation only mentions localhost or [IP address].

3

That’s because that domain doesn’t exist in your network. Some routers use local so your server would be accessible through plex.local:32400. If you change it to lan in your router and set your VM interface to bridge than you don’t have to do this workaround.

4

pihole is already setup to hand out .lan addresses. vm interface already set to bridge the network.

Regarding the documentation saying to use localhost or IP address, that may be correct, but the server indicating that it doesn’t exist when you’re connected to it via the name DHCP is giving out is completely unintuitive.