Can't change permissions for mount of external drives

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
1

I just got an HP 290 today and am in the process of setting it up to be purely a Plex box. So I Went through the HP assistant to see if there were any bios updates, etc and there were none. I threw in a 500GB nvme drive and disconnected both the hard drive and cd rom drive that are in there. The Ubuntu install went perfectly fine; did the minimal install option. Then I installed Plex server and got down to going through the process of mounting my two external NTFS drives. Will put together a NAS later, but for now I’m just going to use the two externals I had connected to my Nvidia Shield.

I’ve been going through this: Using EXT, NTFS, or other format drives (internal or external) on Linux

Everything seems to go fine. The dirs are made, fstab entries are in using the UUID, and the OS sees the drives and their contents fine. The problem is that Plex can’t see the drives at all. When doing the “ls -la /plex” command it shows

drwxr-xr-x     4     bitzie     bitzie     4096     Apr 20 14:40     .
drwxr-xr-x     26     bitzie     bitzie     4096     Apr 20 14:40     ..
drwxrwxrwx      1      root      root      4096      Apr 20 14:40      aneks
drwxrwxrwx      1      root      root      4096      Apr 20 14:40      annex

I’m sure I’m missing something completely stupid here. I’m not a total linux noob as I used to run Ubuntu many years ago, but I’m pretty close since it’s been so long.

2

A couple of questions to get started:

  1. Did you install the native Plex package, or did you install in a container (Docker, LXC, etc…)?
  2. If you installed the native package, did you install it from the Plex website or from the Ubuntu software app?

Hopefully the answers are native, from the Plex website. The rest of this assumes that is the case.

Please show the output of the following (assumes the mount directories were created under /plex, adjust if incorrect):

  • cat /etc/fstab
  • ls -al / (with the disks unmounted)
  • ls -al /plex (with the disks unmounted)
  • ls -al / (with the disks mounted)
  • ls -al /plex (with the disks mounted)
  • ls -al /plex/aneks (with the disks mounted)
  • ls -al /plex/annex (with the disks mounted)

By default, Plex Media Server runs as user plex; so this user needs at least read and execute permissions to any directories where media is stored (read permissions to read the contents of the directories, execute permissions to change to directories). The ls output above shows that the folders under /plex are owned by root but that their permissions are wide open. Normally this would allow read, write, and execute permissions to everyone.

If you are unable to browse these folders in the Add Folders dialog something very weird is going on. Can you show a screenshot of what you see when you open Add folders -> Browse For Media Folder and select root /? You may need to scroll the screen down a bit to show where /plex should be.

3

I installed the native package, but installed through Ubuntu, not the Plex website. I ended up using the method found in the OP here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/4q8fnj/using_an_external_usb_hdd_with_plex_on_linux/ and it works perfect. Now, I’m not against redoing things, so is there any real downside to how I’ve got it working thus far? Like that thread said, I changed the mount points over to being in /mnt.

4

No need to change anything. Sub-directories of /mnt are used for mounting disks, by convention, so that’s fine. It is generally recommended to use the package from the Plex site, but if you’ve got it working with the Ubuntu package, that’s fine too. Until you have issues with it. I’m not sure how often it’s updated, so you may not always have the latest releases available.

[Edit]
Actually, since you’re pretty early on with this installation, I’d suggest removing the Ubuntu package and installing the version from the Plex website. The Ubuntu package appears to do a non-standard install (no dedicated user, different install location, it’s a Snap package). It may work fine now, but if you have issues down the road it will be hard to support because of its inconsistencies with the official package.

5

Ahh well. I’ll change over the install this morning then. At least it should just take time for Plex to do its thing as the painful bit of getting the drives mounted properly is all done now. Thanks for the help!

One question, why do so many people run Plex in Docker? I see tons of tutorials on how to do it, but nobody really says why.

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That’s a good question. For some folks it’s just because they can. For others, it’s to run Plex on a platform on which they’d not be able to otherwise. It is a good way to sandbox an application and keep it segregated from the rest of the OS. But, in general, I recommend against using it for Plex unless you are familiar with the technology and have a good reason to use it.

I’m sure there are others on these forums who could give you some very good reasons why they use it, I know it’s very popular.

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