Linux: PMS service won't start (intermittently)

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.25.3.5409
Player Version#: 4.69.1

OS: Linux Mint 20 (= Ubuntu 20.04). My music library is running on an external hard drive formatted NTFS. This is a dual boot machine, which may be significant, and making the already highly neurotic Plex permissions struggle after I boot to W10 and then boot back to Linux… who knows?

This is utterly infuriating. Yesterday it was running fine, now it’s not. I’ve tried rebooting several times, and tried starting the service each time several times each reboot.

This is one way of trying to start the service:

sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver.service

… after this it waits around for about 20 s, status “activating”, then decides it wants to fail.

This is the thing I then get with
sudo systemctl status plexmediaserver.service:
“Active: failed (Result: signal) since Tue 2022-01-18 15:56:21 GMT; 43s ago
…
Main PID: 7274 (code=killed, signal=SEGV)”

In addition to any answers which may solve my issue, I have another question: why has Plex been designed to be so neurotic? Why can’t I just flip a switch and say “I don’t care about permissions and ownerships”?

I also don’t know where to find any logs which may have been generated by my attempts to start the server.

1 hour later

I have managed to restart the thing… by reinstalling. To my relief most of the settings of the previous install appear to have been preserved.

But the question then is: do I have to reinstall PMS each time I boot to Linux (specifically after having previously booted to W10 each time)? Why would this be so? Even if the music library location is formatted in a format which PMS doesn’t like, the entire app is installed exclusively in Linux’s own main boot partition.

2

Mint isn’t Ubuntu. It’s a derivative and historically a very problematic one at that.

It will work “until it doesn’t” and it does this without rhyme or reason.

Regaring the permissions; That’s Linux enforcing permissions. Plex can’t do a thing unless Linux allows it.

It sounds like you’re having issues with operating Linux itself?

Based on past experience with others;

  1. Abandon Mint before you become vested in it and infuriated at its instability. Use real Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (not Ubuntu 21)

  2. Take some time to read some of the Linux primers out there. They’ll explain how and why Linux works the way it does ( It came from the days of 100’s of users on a single computer at the same time and the need to enforce privacy between users )

3

I’d describe myself as a low-level Linux user, although I’ve been using it more and more over the past 10 years or so (two applications exclusive to W10 which I use for my work prevent me switching away from W10, which I’d love to do).

So I know something modest about permissions and ownership. Other service-based applications do not have the degree of neurosis which Plex appears to manifest, e.g. Elasticsearch.

All that time I have been using Mint. Before I started to do so I looked into what the experts said about things like stability. Very few agree with your view.

But you seem to be the resident expert on Plex itself: perhaps you’re talking specifically about marrying Mint and Plex?

More to the point, I am assuming you are a big expert, so do you have anything to suggest to answer my difficulty, rather than just saying I’m using a rubbish OS and know nothing about Linux? Surprisingly, I posted this post because I was hoping for helpful answers.

My own suspicion is that it is the fact that this is a dual boot machine which may be the main cause of this present problem: but exactly WHY booting to W10 and booting back to Linux should cause PMS to fail apparently so obdurately, when it’s installed on the main Linux boot partition: that’s the question.

4

I can show you how to make Plex run as your username on Linux.

Once done, you and the default user plex won’t ever argue about ‘neurotic permissions’ anymore. If you can see a file, so can it.

The detailed procedure is here (it shows more of what can be done).

For you, the procedure is as follows (substitute as appropriate here)

  1. Stop Plex
  2. sudo systemctl edit plexmediaserver (the editor will open)
    – In that file add
[Service]
User=your_linux_username_here
Group=your_linux_username_here
  1. Save the file
  2. Now change the ownership of all PMS’s operating files so they are owned by that username. (this might take some time to complete so be patient)
sudo chown -R  your_linux_username:your_linux_username /var/lib/plexmediaserver
  1. sudo systemctl daemon-reload
  2. sudo systemctl start plexmediaserver

When this is complete, Plex will be able to see whatever your username can see.

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