The computer I’ve been running Plex on is getting long in the tooth and I wish to move my installation to another box (temporarily) which runs Linux Ubuntu. I wanted to know if copying the database files from my Windows installation over, having stopped the server on Linux would show me and my users the same friendly server name, and all our watch history so that we don’t have to manually mark items as watched.
If I’m missing something please instruct me on how to do this. The ultimate goal is to have a dedicated Synology NAS to run this on from the end of December so I would need to know then how to do it anyway if I don’t move my media to the Linux machine.
Thanks a lot for your quick response. I would have never considered some of the steps in that post and now that I’ve seen them they make perfect sense.
I have two additional questions: I remember at some point having to take additional steps to ensure that my server could play HEVC content (most of my content is HEVC and some of it in 4K) so I’d like that to play without hiccups. I was never sure if that was some Windows specific licensing issue I had to get around or if it’s universal.
Lastly, are there additional steps required to make the new server visible from outside my home network? I’m not much of a Linux user and this machine runs on Linux because of something that I need that requires Linux… I would need to know if and how to open up the firewall to allow just the Plex traffic through.
I’m not aware of any special configurations for HEVC/4K playback to work.
As for remote access – should be similar to your previous Windows setup; configuration will mostly depend on your router configuration.
Asking because you need at least a DSx18+ to transcode 2160P HEVC video.
Subtitle burning is, of course, an entirely separate problem which nothing but a big Xeon/Ryzen Synology can handle in the CPU.
I was considering moving to a DS920+ since when I looked into the matter it turned out to have hardware transcoding available. I hadn’t settled on a one yet since another concern I have is available space. I’m still considering whether or not to get one with 5 or 6 bays but will still need something with a decent number of cores and hardware acceleration.
Will the 920+ do? Is there any other that you would recommend?
So, I bit the bullet a few days ago. Biting the bullet sounds a little dangerous… That’s a weird expression. Anyway, I went ahead and did the migration. I faced a couple of issues that I was able to handle…
At first it got stuck when building the library so I stopped and uninstalled. When I tried again, it didn’t get past the library reading again. So the steps I took were…
Installed again and stopped the service without interacting with it.
Ran ls -l on the installed database files and noted the attributes… These. rw-rw-r–
Copied over the files from my backup and checked the attributes… These were rwxrwxrwx.
Changed the attributes to match the original
Started the server and completed the setup. I was able to play some music from my phone
There are now 2 weird issues… First is that my global music extras aren’t being seen. Any extras that are in the artist folder are showing up but the ones I placed in the global music extras folder aren’t being seen.
The second is that when trying to setup remote access, it kept showing up and after a few seconds saying that it can’t be seen outside the network. I trued several things such as manually choosing a port, and opening it up using ufw. I eventually gave up until looking at the dashboard a couple of hours ago and saw that someone was watching with my account on their TV… Although it said there are issues accessing it.
“Bite the bullet” and “Pull the trigger” come from Western-style movies.
Today, we have “bite sticks” for enduring pain (yes, there are such things)
Permissions “777” (rwxrwxrwx) make sense when copying from NTFS.
PMS default native app permissions are based on type (directory or file)
[chuck@lizum plexmediaserver.2003]$ cd Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server/
[chuck@lizum Plex Media Server.2004]$ ls -la
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 10 plex plex 4096 Oct 18 20:50 ./
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 31 Oct 18 20:05 ../
drwxr-xr-x 6 plex plex 4096 Oct 18 20:08 Cache/
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 57 Oct 18 20:05 Codecs/
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 58 Oct 18 20:07 Crash Reports/
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 33 Oct 18 20:05 Drivers/
-rw------- 1 plex plex 42 Oct 18 20:07 .LocalAdminToken
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Oct 18 20:07 Logs/
drwxr-xr-x 2 plex plex 6 Oct 18 20:05 Plug-ins/
drwxr-xr-x 7 plex plex 96 Oct 18 20:07 Plug-in Support/
-rw------- 1 plex plex 715 Oct 18 20:08 Preferences.xml
Unless your home LAN is perfect (all devices are 100% perfect industry spec), you’ll get goofy behavior from Remote Access which will eventually report truth.
This happens because ISPs love to customize (or just be cheap) with the firmware in their devices.
Thanks @ChuckPa for your response, especially for the origins of biting the bullet. That’s going the extra mile (this reference I understand - and suddenly Captain America saying, “I do! I understood that reference” comes to mind).
I have my server running smoothly again. I just moved the global music extras into the artist folders and refreshed metadata and I know the remote access is available when I’m not looking. Literally… When I open the dashboard I see that there’s a check mark next to it saying it’s fine and a few seconds later it says that it’s not working.
I’ll mark this topic as solved and cross the NAS bridge when I get to it. Currently I think the DS920+ is the best option from Synology, the only ones I’ve seen that are better go up to 3 grand which is a liiiiittle steep and the advantages over my current choice are multiple simultaneous 4K streams and I’m usually the only one watching anything in 4K.
you’ll get goofy behavior from Remote Access which will eventually report truth.
I’m here to state that Remote Access now reports the truth. Without making any changes to my setup and taking it on faith that my server could be seen and accessed (and was just shy when reporting) it now has a check mark that doesn’t go away.
So for anyone who faces a similar issue, one strategy might be patience and it will eventually sort itself out.
