Please do the following;
Lol, probably not the best permissions from a security standpoint. Glad things are working for you though. I will through out a guess, you copied that directory and its contents as root and that is who owns all those directories and files. I presume you are using the default setup and the media server is running as user plex, group plex. You can do a recursive changing of ownership and group to plex:plex
From what you have posted before, I know this is a small, private box and most likely behind a router and nobody else is logging on, so the security implications are most likely minor as things go.
Yea this is a small home box behind a firewall and soon will be locked right back down. I was reading about the permissions and honestly was so damn sick of dealing with PLEX all day yesterday just went with the easiest “permit all now” path possible.
Also, this is the first time I’m seriously using Linux outside work appliances and working out permission models is lower on the list than my husband wondering why he can’t watch his shows. lol
If I understand how Linux works and isolates services, I should be able to install something like pi-hole on this server too and it won’t interfere with PLEX at all? I’ve got a Synology NAS running Docker just for a pi-hole setup and it seems easier to just run it on the always on PLEX box.
Thank you @Atomatth
I’ve found other transcoding is working as intended, so I’m not sure why the test I ran with the Golden Girls failed.
No, I get that. Been there myself at times. As you work with plex & linux, things will start making more sense and get easier. I totally get the putting a spouse first. 
A couple of support articles you may want to bookmark and dive into later
Chuck PA’s Linux Tips & Tricks
I have not used pi-hole, but I do not think it would interfere with plex.
@Atomatth I figured out the issue I think. The SRT subtitles for shows that had audio analysis done were also not working. So what I did was refresh Golden Girls and try to manually trigger Analysis which was done instantly. After that SRTs worked, Transcoding of the show (and others I’d run the Audio Analysis on) worked and all is well. I’ll manually refresh anything that comes up with the transcode or missing SRT error.
Looping back…
Everything is working great except the auto detect changes/only scan changes function. Linux is MUCH faster than Win11 was, it’s just noticeable in every click on the web portal, collections load faster (still slow but faster), it’s all just snappier. Totally worth the change over and if I knew ahead of time I’d of been running Linux for PLEX the last ten years.
That said, there was a lot about Linux I needed to learn on the fly. For those coming behind me, Linux isn’t like Windows, you need to basically piece together every little thing you need. I took the hard route and installed Ubuntu Server with no GUI so there was A LOT of command lines to look up as I went. Look up how to mount network shares (cifs or nfs), setup a ram drive for the transcoding folder, permissions (777), remote access, where to put the PLEX data in the new environment, convert the database over (none of the library changes worked), expanding the default Ubuntu installation folder to be the full drive size, etc.
Thank you to everyone who chimed in, chatted, and helped me along. Huge performance improvement, would highly recommend Linux if you use a dedicated hardware device for PLEX.
Too late now, but you likely just needed a chown instead of a chmod on the plex directory to grant ownership to the plex user. Resetting permissions after the chmod could be tedious :).
You make a good point, though, in that folks who know nothing about linux should spend a little bit of time running through some tutorials on the basics of how to get around the distribution they are going to use and understand what they are doing before moving applications. Just my opinion, worth exactly what you paid for it.
Hey! In case anyone is still watching this thread, the “Run a partial scan when changes are detected” function is not working at all. Everything else works smoothly and it’s been faster, but that one function not working means when I add a single episode of a show or movie the whole library needs to be scanned in order to see it. I’ve looked around and sometimes people say it’s because linux can’t watch as many folders but when I can this command it reports back it’s able to look at 524288 folders and I have about 320000 in the media tree so it should be working.
Thoughts? Anyone else encounter issues with the run a partial scan not working with a massive library on Ubuntu?
fwiw I have never been able to get this working. I just have my server set to scan every few hours and will run a manual scan when in a hurry
