FreeBSD 13.1 & Plex Media Server 1.32.3.7162

Plex Media Server
1

After the most recent update, plexmediaserver service refuses to start. I have of course tried during a reboot as well as manually using the onestart option. Not sure what is going on but I did look through the log files and found this in the Plex log file “Startup Crash.log”

Failed to initialize logging: Empty or non-existant file

The server is FreeBSD 13.1 and is fully updated. Plex version is shown in the topic title. Nothing was touched for several days before this started. I did the plex version update this morning, hoping doing so might fix the glitch.

Before I tear the server apart and rebuild, I would appreciate any advice this community can offer.

Thanks in advance!

2

  1. Archive and copy your plexdata-plexpass folder out before you remake the server and see if you can copy it into the new server and recover your libraries and other work.

  2. I recommend you manually stop the server process and do a snapshot of the server dataset/jail before applying updates in the future. That way when something goes bad you can just rollback to before it happened.

3

Unfortunately, this is not a VM but rather a physical server. The data (media files) are all in tact. I do have a backup of the data files but not the OS disk. So, unless I can figure out how to get plex to start again, my only option is to rebuild once I have verified all of the media files are safely backed up and stored elsewhere.

I think I will take advantage of this situation and build plex as a FreeBSD virtual machine on my VMWare host. This removes one physical box from my home lab and allows me to expand storage as needed.