Password Reset = PMS Destroyed (ReadyNAS) & SO MUCH PROFANITY

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.11.x
Player Version#: all versions affected

This is a complete farse.

I’m in the same category as most people here: Plex got a hit by an exploit, and we changed our passwords, resulting in us losing access to the PMS.

I have read many, many of FAQs, and read a lot of how people are suffering, and how some are generating some success. I will share my experience.

  • After changing the password, and logging back in, the PMS that I own and run on a ReadyNAS 516 (for the past many years) became “unavailable”. It did show up in my list of PMS (Plex servers), but nothing I could do could make it “available”.

  • My friend’s PMS is still in my list. Awesome. But I need my own back.

  • I read all sorts of FAQs pointing to the fact that I need to reclaim the NAS. That option was not available to me in the settings menu… because… I DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO THE PMS, despite the fact that I see it in my list of servers..

It is “unavailable”.

You can only claim/re-claim a NAS that is “available”. So, enough with the “did you try to claim it” discussions.

  • Then I made the effort to modify preferences.xml. Removed all the references to my account, email, token, etc. as per instructions. That did jack-squat.

  • The I uninstalled the plex app from the NAS, the re-installed. Same result - the PMS is listed, but unavailable. Again, you cannot claim it if you can’t connect to it.

  • Then I noticed my NAS was listed as one of the devices. So, I removed it, thinking some sort of conflict was causing the issue. NOW, it’s not even listed in my list of PMS. So I now blew it up even more!

  • Uninstalled, re-installed again. Same result.

To be clear, I am running the PMS on my NAS. I browse to this same NAS, from the same subnet, at http://x.x.x.x:32400/web/ to manage it, as always.

I do not understand this at all. I am at a point where I can’t see the PMS anymore, despite the fact that I am managing the PMS right on the NAS, where the PMS on the NAS is supposed to “automagically show up”… and there is no option to simply “add a new PMS” (that would be so nice to have, BTW).

I am out of things to try.

Where do I go from here?

Any help/guidance would be appreciated!

2

If you’re stuck on a troublesome platform, you could give this a try. Usually the steps are rather straight forward and most users reporting massive issues indeed simply missed reclaiming their server (which you already attempted doing), or did so from a different network or via the hosted web app…

3

@rog8932

To add to Tom,

I’m the engineer who slapped together the utility … which also works on ReadyNAS at this point. (sorry it’s not the most graceful thing in the world… yet)

If you have any questions / issues using it, please let me know.

So far, everyone who’s used it has been successful on first attempt.

4

Thank you for taking the time to put that together. However, it abended on me.

It does look promising in that it know exactly what went wrong… it can’t find the credentials. So it seems I need get the credentials back into the NAS config file… somehow.

(output)

/apps/plexmediaserver/MediaLibrary/Plex Media Server# ./UserCredentialReset.sh

      Plex Media Server user credential reset and reclaim tool (Netgear ReadyNAS)

This utility will reset the server’s credentials. It will then reclaim the server for you via a Plex Claim tokem from Plex.tv

Please enter Plex Claim Token copied from Claim | Plex : claim-xxxx-redacted
Clearing Preferences.xml
Preferences.xml cleared
Getting new credentials from Plex.tv
ERROR: Could not get credentials from plex.tv (Error: 0)

** UPDATE **

I tried again, but this time:

I logged out all devices, and tried it again - this time, it worked! I am currently re-adding my libraries (Because I uninstalled/re-installed which blew away all my configs and customizations).

Thank you for your time, effort and help!