Cannot completely delete and setup new server

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.21.1.3876

Long story short, I went a little cowboy and removed my server from the settings menu and now I’m going nuts trying to create a new server.

Everything I’ve found on here so far is just running me in circles.
The machine running PMS is a remote raspberrypi running Ubuntu at my inlaws that I have SSH access into as well as a domain that points to it to access the local web app.

What I’ve done so far:

I initially thought just completely removing PMS from the server would do it such that when I reinstall it and access the web app I’d be presented with the setup wizard to create a new server. Easy peasy. No dice.

So I found the link to try to force the setup wizard.
http://{DOMAIN}/manage/index.html#!/setup
I get what looks like the setup screen with a message that “Setup is not allowed for shared servers” Not sure why this message appears.

Searching the google machine and these forums keeps bringing me back to this post.

When I look at my Preferences.xml file I don’t have any of the key pairs that this post mentions. It only has:
OldestPreviousVersion
MachineIdentifier
ProcessedMachineIdentifier
AnonymousMachineIdentifier
MetricsEpoch

I’m stuck in a loop at this point. I’ve removed and reinstalled multiple times rebooting the machine between deletion and install and searched and searched and am getting nowhere. It seems there should be a way to completely remove Plex to a point where it is as though it never existed on this server and start from scratch but I cannot find a way that actually does that despite what the guides say.

2

Suggest deleting the Preferences.xml and starting completely afresh with a new server instant

As the server is remote you would need an ssh tunnel to set it up as servers can only be setup through localhost or same subnet

See section on ssh tunnel here
Installation | Plex Support

3

I already have an SSH tunnel. Part of what I’ve done previously is delete the entire data folder for plex (sudo rm -R /var/lib/plexmediaserver/*) after doing a dpkg -r plexmediaserver which deleted the Preferences.xml since it’s included in the *. This, in theory, should allow me to start totally fresh and give me the setup wizard. It doesn’t. It’s like there is a Plex ghost still lurking on the server after doing this. These issues persist after I’ve done this and reinstalled. I’ve tried older versions as well with the same or worse results.

4

So I finally decided to actually read the post and realized what you mean. I needed to access the web app as localhost, not from the domain remotely.

This is the section that I wasn’t doing:

macOS or Linux

  1. Open a Terminal window or your command prompt
  2. Enter the following command (substituting the IP address of your server as appropriate):
    ssh ip.address.of.server -L 8888:localhost:32400
  3. Open a browser window
  4. Type http://localhost:8888/web into the address bar
  5. The browser will connect to the server as if it were local and load Plex Web App

After doing that, all is well. I was able to create the new server. Thanks.

5

Go to https://app.plex.tv

Settings - Authorized Devices - Server (dropdown)

Remove the Instance entry for the now-deleted server.

6

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.