There are two methods to manually installing or Upgrading Plex Media Server on the Drobo, the first is to drop the plex.tgz in the DroboApps share, and then restart your NAS. The second is to enable the SSH service, download the plex.tgz to your DroboApps share and then run the Drobo apps installer script without the need to reboot your NAS. Both methods are outlined below;
DroboApps share method
(no SSH required)
Enable the Drobo Apps share via the Drobo Dasbboard .
(All Drobos > Drobo Settings... > Admin Settings > Enable Drobo Apps)
Download the Plex Media Server plex.tgz**strong text** from https://www.plex.tv/media-server-downloads/ NOTE: If your browser renames the file to plex.tar please rename it back to plex.tgz or you may have issues with it automatically installing
Connect to your Drobo from Windows Explorer or macOS Finder and copy the downloaded plex.tgz to the root of the share, ensuring it is named plex.tgz
Restart your Drobo from the Drobo Dashboard
(All Drobos > Tools > Restart)
SSH command-line method
Enable the Drobo Apps share via the Drobo Dasbboard
(All Drobos > Drobo Settings... > Admin Settings > Enable Drobo Apps)
Ensure the Dropbear is installed and running (NOTE: You can find this in the Drobo Apps sidebar under the All category)
Open up Putty or Terminal on your computer and connect to your Drobo via SSH # ssh Admin@IP_OF_DROBO (where “Admin” is your main admin user on the Drobo)
Once connected you switch to root user to allow installing apps. sudo -i
Change to the DroboApps share directory. cd /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps
Download PMS directly to the DroboApps share directory wget --trust-server-names PMS_DOWNLOAD_URL
eg; wget --trust-server-names https://downloads.plex.tv/plex-media-server-new/1.16.5.1554-1e5ff713d/drobo/plex.tgz
Stop the current Plex Media Server if it is running. DroboApps.sh stop_app plex
Install or Upgrade Plex Media Server. DroboApps.sh install
(Optional) Check if PMS is now upgraded and running. The output will show the version that is currently installed and running) wget -qO- http://localhost:32400/identity
Open Plex Web app and connect to your Drobo Plex Media Server.
@chrisallen This is fantastic! Thank you for putting together such a great KB.
I am having an odd problem that I did not find in the thread here. I have gone through the process multiple times and believe I successfully upgraded - Yay.
But the problem is that after reboots and restarts, my server can no longer be seen in the web app. I can get to the web page running on my server and see other connected server from friends but my own has disconnected and shows an error message that my server is not allowing secure connections, or that it is unavailable all together. I have also noticed that my \DroboApps is unreachable via File Explorer, even though I can browse the apps in teh Drobo Dashboard and I can SSh to that directory and the permissions look normal. Any thoughts?
I’m late to the party. (and bumping a stale thread )
I’ve only just installed the Plex server app on my Drobo FS. I used the “drop the .tgz into the DroboApps share and reboot” method. The install process appears to have worked, and I can see the newly created files/folders. What I’m not seeing are any local servers available from phone, tablet, computer, or set-top apps. Kinda feels like something similar to what @Dan_t3h_man88 is running into, but when I try “wget -qO- localhost:32400/identity”, my response is “wget: not an http or ftp url: localhost:32400/identity” which feels a lot like my server app isn’t even running.
I’ll continue my search for answers, just figured it might not hurt to drop a line in here too.
Thank you - these instructions worked extremely well for Drobo 5N2 and the SSH command-line method.
For the DroboApps share method, an issue I had was that when I copied the plex.tgz, downloaded by my client web browser (on a Mac) and copied to the DroboApps share on the Drobo5N2 it would not then automatically install on drobo restart.
I determined the cause by looking at the command line (using DroboApps.sh install)… the web-client downloaded .tgz file reported the errors:
tar: invalid magic
tar: short read
I was able to get a good version of the .tgz file directly using your instructions for wget at the command line.
Either I had incorrectly downloaded a Mac version in the first instance, or some aspect of copy the .tgz to the DroboApps share using the Mac Finder had somehow corrupted it.
Hi there. Im new here and sorry in advance if Im in the wrong place. I am having issues with PMS on my drobo. All was fine for last few yrs, updates ok, but recently I couldn’t update. I read the above thread and followed your instructions to manually update, which didn’t work. I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling via the dashboard. Unfortunately now I cannot get the pms to start on the drobo. Im stuck without any pms access. Can anyone help? Thanks
Hi there.
I have been following your detailed instruction for manual update/install of PMS on my Drobo, as it hasn’t had a successful update for many months. I eventually managed last week to get the current PMS onto it, and its now run the scans of the library again so I can see it from the web browser. However can you help me with a couple of points:
The Drobo still thinks I need to update, from within the dashboard, yet the browser says all up to date.
I cannot get my Plex app on the iPhone to talk to the pms now, as it says that the version is too old and needs updating… is this to do with the same issue above?
How can I fix this? I have already cleared cache etc. Thanks in advance
This is normal. The Drobo does a version check to see if the version installed is from their appstore. Even if the version installed is newer, it still flags it as needing an update because the newer version you have installed didn’t come from their appstore.
You might need to do another manual update to 1.21.3.4021-5a0a3e4b2 to fix that issue.
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