My PC user plex starts the server and plex owns and has permissions to /home/lj/PlexMedia (the directory where the DVR is supposed to store OTA files) but I keep getting the triangle “No Write Access…” /home/lj/PlexMedia is created and mounted by an entry in /etc/fstab. I assume I have an obscure permission problem. Please detail the command line steps I need to perform to determine if the permissions that are set are appropriate for the PMS. I’ve searched Google and this forum for a solution. None found.
The problem apparently was that the directory in /home/lj/PlexMedia named TV Shows was owned by my regular user lj and not by the user named plex. Now showing
lj@plex:~/PlexMedia$ ls -al /home/lj/PlexMedia
total 16
drwxrwxrwx 4 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 07:44 .
drwxr-xr-x 23 lj lj 4096 Jan 1 18:22 …
drwxr-xr-x 2 plex plex 4096 Dec 29 07:02 .grab
drwxrwxr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 07:48 TV_Shows
(Note the underscore in TV_Shows and if necessary you might have to
lj@plex:~/PlexMedia$ mkdir TV_Shows
then
lj@plex:~/PlexMedia$ chown plex:plex TV_Shows
to set ownership and group of TV_Shows directory to user “plex” and group “plex”
FYI, Entry in /etc/fstab is
–# PlexMedia on /dev/sdb
UUID=f25c8b3b-095c-47cd-9837-84023d3a29a3 /home/lj/PlexMedia ext4 defaults,auto,nofail 0 1
You can determine the uuid of your storage hd by
lj@plex:~/PlexMedia$ ls -al /dev/disk/by-uuid
BTW if you do all the checks above and start a recording then go to your equivalent /home/lj/PlexMedia/TV_Shows directory, you won’t see anything right away. PMS saves recordings to a hidden directory named .grab. So you can check for on going recordings by doing:lj@plex:~$ ls -al /home/lj/PlexMedia/TV_Shows/.grab
which will show something like this:
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 5 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 08:07 .
drwxrwxr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 07:48 …
drwxr-xr-x 2 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 07:48 99e394a784af0044fff8a694528b016ae7659f38
drwxr-xr-x 2 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 08:07 da94a73eb577ed05ac0ce2a7472b98a6158fc516
drwxr-xr-x 2 plex plex 4096 Jan 2 08:07 e71f121f28f595ef6ab405b28a0c8e86f6189ad
where the three entries 07:48 and 8:07 represent on going recordings and watching live TV on my Quad HD OTA pci device from Hauppauge . (Which works very well by the way)
Solve one error and you get five more. PMS is a basket of trouble at least in Linux ubuntu. I’m going back to MythTV which has it’s own Ubuntu distro Mythbuntu and which works flawlessly. Can I have my $39 back please.
What is the DVR:Grabber and why is the .log file sprinkled with " DVR:Grabber: No write permission." Deosn’t the Grabber (what ever that is) have the same permissions as the user plex?
This error repeats and recording is missed.
Jan 05, 2018 17:30:05.162 [0x7f25063f3700] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Operation for 5:30 PM ABC Local News - Episode 01-05 completed with status error (No write access to destination)
Hopefully someone will know “WHAT” destination is being referred to.
.grab folder is created by plex and owned by plex and is a member of group plex.
Did you move the storage location for the recording?
One recording (Megyn Kelly Today) seems to indication grab folder is in /home/lj/PlexMedia/TV_Shows:
31503 Jan 05, 2018 09:00:00.606 [0x7fc279bfd700] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Saving recording to /home/lj/PlexMedia/TV_Shows/.grab/ea4b6ddd0364f693da07c3e5c41ec8b3b410f668
While Superstore seems to indicate no top level directories for storing files:
18322 Jan 05, 2018 04:59:15.917 [0x7fc2783ff700] DEBUG - DVR:Grabber: Saving recording to .grab/24ba498f93ec0bc6c97ad86cf591de6e96c558c8
I would suggest deleting the scheduled recordings for:
Superstore
Nova
The View
KPAX 5:30 News
Hot Bench
Crime Watch Daily With Chris Hansen
DailyMailTV
Those are the shows that do not have a top level folder and had errors with No Write Permission in the logs submitted.
Plex does not like when storage locations are changed and recordings are already scheduled.
Did you move the storage location for the recording?
John: At this point after several weeks of fuming fussing, I can’t really say. It’s my intention to put the recordings on a separate HD. That HD gets mounted from an entry in /etc/fstab as hopefully I have detailed above. I manually set owner and group of the only file on the HD (/PlexMedia) to user plex and group plex.
So encourage by your reply, I’m starting over fresh. This time being careful not to accidentally tell plex to schedule a recording to a file system location which doesn’t exist. My plex pc is dual boot so last night I installed plex on it’s copy of Win10. It ran flawlessly without error.
Glad to hear you were working with fresh install. Although you could have probably just deleted and added the existing recordings back to your Windows boot image. If you change storage locations for a library in the future be aware that scheduled recordings will not change to the new storage location. For example if you originally setup the library for /home/lj/TV_Shows and later change the library to /home/lj/PlexMedia/TV_Shows any existing scheduled recordings are expecting to store files in /home/lj/TV_Shows which no longer exists in the library. Users that have multiple storage locations for a library the user can pick a storage location. For example, if I setup a recording I get a Location Drop Down to select which library location to store the recording.
The recording is then associated with the location I choose. If the user does not have multiple storage locations for a library no Drop Down is provided and the recording is associated with the only storage location in the library.
One step forward, two steps back:
sudo dpkg -i plexmediaserver_1.11.0.4666-fc63598ba_amd64.deb
…
Job for plexmediaserver.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See “systemctl status plexmediaserver.service” and “journalctl -xe” for details.
…
lj@plex:~$ systemctl status plexmediaserver.service
● plexmediaserver.service - Plex Media Server for Linux
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead) (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2018-01-06 11:53:37 MST; 15min ago
Process: 5998 ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c /usr/bin/test -d “${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}” || /bin/mkdir -p “${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}” (code=exiJan 06 11:53:32 plex systemd[1]: Failed to start Plex Media Server for Linux.
Jan 06 11:53:32 plex systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Unit entered failed state.
Jan 06 11:53:32 plex systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.
Jan 06 11:53:37 plex systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
Jan 06 11:53:37 plex systemd[1]: Stopped Plex Media Server for Linux.
Jan 06 11:53:37 plex systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Jan 06 11:53:37 plex systemd[1]: Failed to start Plex Media Server for Linux.
Google-ing for help ATT.
As a long time user of Linux, I don’t know why I have such an aversion to checking Ubuntu’s rather extensive set of logs. In system.log, I found an entry where the plex install script failed. It stated:
Jan 6 18:21:34 plex sh[4658]: /bin/mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/var/lib/plexmediaserver’: Permission denied
Permissions for /var/lib looked OK for an install script running with admin privilege, so I decided to help the install program by creating that directory:
sudo mkdir /var/lib/plexmediaserver
sudo chown plex:plex /var/lib/plexmediaserver
Then I tried installing again with:
sudo dpkg -i plexmediaserver_1.11.0.4666-fc63598ba_amd64.deb
To my delight, the install ran without error. Then I scheduled a few test OTA programs. Finally, SUCCESS! All programs were recorded without error.
BTW, If any one needs an OTA tuner and their plex server is in a Linux based box, the Hauppauge® WinTV-quadHD PCI Express TV Tuner Card (1609) works flawlessly. Just install Hauppauges PPA so you get the needed drivers.
In looking back over my journey into Plex on Ubuntu, I see I unnecessarily went down several blind alleys. Here are the steps I should have followed to put plex’s recordings onto a separate HD on a new install of Ubuntu 16.04.
- Make an entry for your HD in /etc/fstab so that your recordings media HD is mounted automatically each time. My entry looks like this:
UUID=be5a1128-e5cd-4433-9a67-4c94cbdd36dd /PlexMedia ext4 defaults,auto,nofail 0 1
-
Format your media HD to ext4 and label the HD. I labeled mine /PlexMedia. I used gparted to format and label the media HD.
-
Reboot and then change owner and group from root to plex of the folder /PlexMedia (actually your media HD) ,to the user and group under which plexmediaserver runs.
sudo chown plex:plex /PlexMedia -
If you have an OTA tuner, install the driver packages for it.
-
Install plexmediaserver using the latest .deb install package from plex.com. Something like (the numbers will change)
sudo dpkg -i plexmediaserver_1.11.0.4666-fc63598ba_amd64.deb -
After the Web user interface to the plex server is running, in Settings, Server LiveTV&DVR, click on “+ add device” to add an OTA tuner. When asked for the location browse to /PlexMedia. Creation of the folder in your media HD named TV Shows will be done by the plexmediasever. This should put all recordings of the library TV Shows on your giant media HD, Later after the server has created some recordings, your /PlexMedia directory should show something like this:
lj@plex:~$ ls -al /PlexMedia
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 11 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 22:29 .
drwxr-xr-x 25 root root 4096 Jan 6 12:21 …
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 22:00 48 Hours (1988)
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 21:30 America ReFramed (2012)
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 21:00 As Time Goes By (1992)
drwxr-xr-x 2 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 22:35 .grab
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 20:30 Keeping Up Appearances (1990)
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 22:03 KPAX News at 10 (1999)
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 21:00 NCIS New Orleans (2014)
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 22:29 News at 10 (2002)
drwxr-xr-x 3 plex plex 4096 Jan 6 21:00 Ten Days in the Valley (2017)
HTH
