Lots of traffic in /tmp on intro detection

Plex Media Server
7

As I said above, we’re going to clean up the confusion caused in the new packaging.

Having traced it all down back to the beginning of time (2011) for Linux.

  1. TMPDIR was always used (for POSIX compliance) 0
  2. TranscoderTempDir is not set by default. If you want that, you can set in Preferences.xml or in the GUI (transcoder - show advanced)

When PMS was first ported to Linux and the team setup the variables, they made plans for having all nice names. PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_TEMPDIR was supposed to be included.

In the initial start_pms script, it was used, if defined, by

TMPDIR="$PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_TMPDIR"

The transition from SYSV -> Upstart -> systemd lost that functionality in systemd.

When I re-introduced SYSV-init support, I accidentally brought it back.
It was never supported in the first place.

Official has always been to set TMPDIR, or any of the four honored by mkstemp() prior to PMS launch .

What will happen now is I’m going to clean up this perpetuation of an error because there is no way for us to selectively pick variable names in service definitions.

The solution I’m going to implement is:

  1. I’ll set TMPDIR to the Plex default (which is per each platform’s default) /tmp
  2. If this isn’t desired, all that’s needed is to declare a new value in override.conf or /etc/default/plexmediaserver (platform dependent)

I will also be adding some support info in the service file and default file to clarify this.