First things first, if I have this in the wrong place I apologise (Mods please move it as needed), right now I honestly cannot tell if this is a server issue or an account issue or what.
About 2 weeks ago, for no apparent reason my plex server started acting all weird for no apparent reason, I mean really weird, like one minute it would work fine, then 5 minutes later TV A could access it, but TV B could not, 10 minutes more and neither TV’s could access it, but my PC and mobile devices could.
10/20/30 whatever minutes after that the TV’s would be fine, and one out of say 5 mobile devices would loose it, then everything might work, then the PC/Browser might fail, and it was all just random, couldn’t see any reasons for it or anything, and every time I tried to pin it down what ever the fault was would vanish and either change to something new or start working again.
I’ve used Plex for years, with a Plex Media Server running inside a VM on HyperV, reading it’s media from a cifs share on my main PC, and using one of 3 “Opera TV” based smart TV’s that we have in the home to watch the media in those shares.
I’ve had the odd “Can’t find server” thing here and there, but logging out and logging back in usually solved that.
This time however it’s totally different, it’s like as if Plex has just gone completely nuts, the logs had absolutely nothing of any help in them, no errors, no nothing, everything 200 coming up green and smelling of roses.
Anyway, I’ve worked my way through all the troubleshooting articles, I’ve tinkered, I’ve altered configs, I restarted, rebooted cleared out meta data, and eventually I now arrive at today, where I’ve completely rebuilt my Plex Server VM from scratch.
Updated to Ubuntu 20.04, added the plex repositories to the OS and “apt installed” a brand new plex media server install.
Just before doing that, I logged out of ALL my plex accounts of the various devices, and when I logged back in on them all I got NO plex media settings in any of the side bars, all I got where the top 5 starting with account, and then the 3 for the player, there’s nothing else, no network settings, no logging settings no nothing.
So I cleaned my metadata folder, started again from scratch, and now I can’t even get into the plex media web server, all I get is a big dark screen with “Not Authorized, you do not have access to this server”, the colours are definitely plex’s colours, so I know it’s nothing like the Nginx web server I have sat in front of it.
I’ve completely replaced my server now, and still nothing works, the ONLY part I have not made any changes too is my actual Plex.TV account that I sign into all of these things with.
Whatever is happening is now permanent, and occurs no matter what I try to log into my plex media server with.
The only possible place I can think of troubleshooting now is my Plex.TV user account.
It’s nearly 2am here in the UK now, so I’ll sort out logs and what not “tomorrow/Later on today”, I have LOTS, from both the new system and the old one, but since they are spread across 2 VM’s it’ll take a bit more than usual to collect them all and zip them.
For now however:
Plex is in it’s own dedicated VM, running on Ubuntu 20.04, using the Plex software repo and systemD for service managment.
The VM is configured with one 2.5ghz VCpu and 2gb up to 8gb Dynamic ram, there are no hardware GPU’s or anything like that available to it.
Plex is running on the standard 32400 port, and is listening on both IPv4 & IPv6, it has an Nginx server sat in front of it listening on port 80, and basically remapping everything to the standard 32400 port. The Nginx proxy is there primarily for the use of my router to port forward to it, PLex responds perfectly fine on either port 80 or it’s normal 32400.
There is NO https access on any of the server or internal network systems, as the TV set’s are slightly older models using older TLS protocols, and so have been set up to only use http connections.
The shares containing the media are on cifs shares provided by a Windows 10 21H1 professional install. From the OS using a file viewer all media is accessible without problem, and the shares and their associated permissions are working OK.
The plex media server has it’s own static IP address obtained from my local network DHCP server via a static lease tied to the VM’s Mac address, the networking side of things all checks out, the VM get’s the IP it expects, and the DNS name resolves correctly in my network to “plex.digital-solutions.local” as expected.
Far short of blowing everything away (Including my account) and starting again from scratch, I really don’t know which way to go next… as I say I’ll attach the logs later today.
A small snippet that has just started to appear in the logs however is this:
DEBUG - Request came in with unrecognized domain / IP ‘plex.digital-solutions’ in header Host; treating as non-local
Right now, I can’t even get to settings or anything because all I get is a “Not Authorized” screen with a triangle/exclamation on.
Hopefully that’s enough details so far to make a start.
Cheers
Shawty
