Failing to Update Plex Media Server plugin on TrueNas

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
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No, you don’t have to do that. Also you don’t have to create any groups on the TrueNAS GUI.

The “plex” user and “plex” group already exist – but only in the jail.

You would just need to log into the shell for that specific jail, stop Plex if it’s running, run the chown command to make sure the owner/group on the files are writable by plex, and then start the Plex service again. You have to be in the jail’s shell, not the outer TrueNAS shell. Remember each jail is like a mini FreeBSD system (only the resources are not limited like a virtual machine). Each jail has its own user and group databases. The TrueNAS shell doesn’t know about any group called plex because it’s not where Plex Media Server is running. PMS is running inside the jail named “plexmediaserver” here.

Edit: The security concern I mentioned is with the old Plex plugin possibly running as root. Since you’re moving to this new jail with the pkg install that doesn’t matter. The pkg version of Plex runs as the user “plex” (that’s why it adds that user and group when it installs).

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Ah I see, that makes sense.

I just tried what you suggested and worked perfectly.

One last question, is it okay to delete the plexdata-plexpass.tar file? That’s in the directory now that everything has been backed-up?

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If everything is moved over and working you do not need the plexdata-plexpass.tar archive now. Also, if you have confirmed everything working on the new server, in the new jail, you can delete the old “plex” plugin jail for your old server. I do recommend you manually detach the mount points from your media folders before you delete the old jail itself. I lost a bunch of media once and had to reupload it and I think that is what happened (I deleted the old jail and the mount points were still linked up).

In the future, if you see a newer version of Plex is available on the pkg build table back there on Freshports, what you would do is:

  1. Log into the shell of the plexmediaserver jail.
  2. Stop the plex server: service plexmediaserver_plexpass stop
  3. (Optional) Go to the TrueNAS interface and make a snapshot of the jail’s “root” system to preserve the old version if you need to roll back.
  4. Back in the jail shell, pkg update, then pkg upgrade, and install the new version.
  5. Start the server back up again: service plexmediaserver_plexpass start
24

Perfect, thank you so much for all the help with this!

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