Not accessing external USB HD

General Discussions
1

Hi-

I am running Lubuntu and Plex on a small SSD drive and I have an external USB drive with movies and music.

Lubuntu mounts and I can access all the files on the external drive but Plex doesn’t see them when I try to add them to a library.

I created a shortcut in the local lubuntu video and music folder and that didn’t work either.

The SSD drive is not big enough to hold the content.

How do I get plex to access the External USB hard drive?

Thank you in advance,

Troy

2

That is usually a permissions problem. Do you just plug it in and let Lubuntu mount the drive? If you do then the permissions will be set to your user to have access but not the plex user.

Linux permissions are covered at https://support.plex.tv/articles/200288596-linux-permissions-guide/

Comments here may help as well Permission for the media folder.

3

The first tip

4

Thank you both for the replies…

Is there not a way to do it from the GUI?

I do Cisco IOS, IOS-XE, IOS-XR and NEX-OS, Juniper Junos and Palo Alto CLI but Linux Command line is still foreign for me.

Thanks again for the replies but that will take me a week to read and comprehend and I am hoping to use the server tomorrow.

Troy

5

No there is not.

Linux has a very strict security model. No one user can see another users’s files without expressly granted permissions.

Linux is not a ‘Learn in a day’ OS because it was originally created in the command line-only days and has evolved into a server-rooted OS (enterprise grade)

If you are familiar with the Windows command line, I can offer three pointers

  1. There are no discrete device letters. Everything is accessed through the file system itself somewhere. Every path begins with /
  2. Windows uses \, Linux uses /
  3. Both Windows and Linux are sensitive to spaces depending on context so surrounding path & file names with spaces embedded in them should almost always be surrounded with quotes "
6

Here is the permissions for the USB HD. Music_Stream and Video_Stream are the only two that are needed.

lin-plex@linplex:/media/lin-plex/Seagate_2_TB$ ls -al
total 1176
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 4096 Aug 6 07:25 .
drwxr-x—+ 3 root root 4096 Aug 7 06:50 …
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 4096 Feb 21 2011 CLM-3_1.0.01ARS
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 0 Aug 6 07:25 “DON’T PLAY”
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 1134592 Aug 5 20:54 Music_Stream
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 0 Apr 11 2016 ‘$RECYCLE.BIN’
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 0 Feb 21 2011 RECYCLER
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 4096 Apr 13 2016 ‘System Volume Information’
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 0 Aug 4 10:53 .Trash-1000
drwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 53248 Aug 6 00:13 Video_Stream
lin-plex@linplex:/media/lin-plex/Seagate_2_TB$

And permissions for a song from in the Music_Stream folder…

-rwxrwxrwx 1 lin-plex lin-plex 6035374 Jan 2 2012 ‘Supertramp - The Logical Song.mp3’

One account on the system “lin-plex” and it is root.

Does Plex use a different account even though it is installed under the lin-plex account?

7

Yes, the default user for plex is called plex.

8
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