I’d like to organize my NAS in such a way that each DSM user have private folders with media accessible only to them.
Let’s say we have two DSM users and they put their private photos in their private corresponding ‘home’ folders on NAS.
They also have separate plex accounts for viewing their private folders.
The problem is that Plex Server can be logged in only by single user at a time and that way the second user cannot see his corresponding private folders.
Is there a way to organize private libraries for plex users using single Plex server?
Yes.
However you’ll still need 1 Plex Account to be the owner/admin of the server. You can then share a subset of your libraries with other Plex users – those shares can show all libraries and their content or a subset of the libraries with restrictions to what content is showing. https://support.plex.tv/articles/204232573-restricting-the-shares/
Plex will however not automatically reflect restrictions based on different DSM users (DSM account != Plex Account).
If I understood you correctly, you suggesting making the following:
making one admin account on DSM which also will be the owner of the PMS (by permanently claiming it)
create two plex users and assign to them shares they can access
But I’d like to give the Plex/DSM users ability to create their own private shares on the DSM/PMS, so that I as an admin don’t need to manage any of their libraries
The solution seems to be in creating two docker containers with their own PMS’es so that each Plex user will claim their corresponding PMS.
But I wonder whether there will be issues with claiming the PMS’es on single IP with different ports.
Also maybe there’s more simple way to achieve my intended behavior - each Plex user independently manages/creates/restricts their own Plex libraries using single DSM
As for each user managing their own content… that’s not going to work 100% as you have it in mind. Non-admin Plex users cannot create their own libraries and you cannot run different Plex Media Server instances on the same NAS.
That being said… You should be able to create different media folders for Plex in each DSM user’s home directory and link those to the libraries intended for their respective Plex users (don’t forget you need to give Plex permissions to see those folders on the DSM!).
You can then link those folders to their respective libraries.
example:
Using movies as an example… the same should be possible with different media/library types.
The Plex Admin will need to scan the libraries files – however it’s possible to automate that (or do periodic scans). Therefore, added media should show up in Plex automatically and get matched etc.
Keep in mind… if those other DSM users don’t follow the Plex naming schemas for the respective library types, media might be ignored or mismatched. The non-admin Plex users cannot fix that… so you as the admin need to keep an eye on things.
You cannot run multiple instances because PMS opens host socket ports.
Those host ports, independent of host or bridge networking mode, are fixed.
Remember, Docker is a container on the host and not a VM with isolated network stack.
Plex’s port 32400 (on the host side) cannot be changed.
It’s only changed on the “outside” (external to the container or external to the device (i.e. Remote Access)
