At a bit of a loss here honestly and I have been struggling for about a week on and off so hopefully someone here can help. I have been running a Plex server on an Ubuntu machine for about a year and a half without issue, but I recently installed a new router and everything seemed to go haywire even though I don’t think it should have effected anything.
I ensure the Plex server has the same static IP as it did with the old router, all media from the NAS is available, but when booting the machine and trying to access the system via localhost:32400, localIP:32400, or any other method, Plex just asks me to create a new server and add my media.
Because of this I also can’t get into the old server at all, no logs or anything else hopefully someone has some ideas of how to proceed as I was hoping to not have to lose my metadata with a new server.
Is anyone able to help me with this? The more I look at it I am thinking that somehow my preferences.xml got deleted and so now my old server basically can’t be found when I boot the machine.
To be fair… changing your router isn’t such a minor change.
If your old/new static IP is not in the subnet/IP range of the new routers default network, you can run into issues.
If your preferences.xml got deleted, you could still access that server locally – at worst it’ll offer you to re-do the setup (which you could skip to find your original libraries untouched).
Thanks for the reply. When first booting the router it did not have the same addresses as the old router, but I did change that since. Could that short time cause an issue like that?
As for the preferences, the server still shows up on my devices it is just “Offline”. I cannot see it locally at all. Everytime I do launch Plex it tries to make me create a new server which I decline.
Not really.
What do you mean by “it tries to make you create a new server”?
Is there an actual setup dialog or do you see the regular Plex Web user interface with only an option to download a server?
That indeed sounds like you had cleared your preferences.xml file.
As mentioned above… you can name it and you should link it to your account but skip the library creation during this dialog. Unless you actually deleted that old server and its data, you should then see the old libraries.
So I created a “Teat-Server”, then claimed it as mentioned above. I was then able to see my old server however it was listed “Offline” and all media is marked “Unavailable”. However it does give me the chance to turn on logging at least (I will try to get a log up at some point).
I hope it is at least a step in the right direction so I thank you for that. I apologise as I did try to read other articles but was having trouble finding my exact issue. Does this simply mean that my preferences were lost and cannot be returned?
That still sounds wrong.
As for the preferences.xml… files are unlikely to just get lost; there’s usually some level of intervention that causes them to be deleted (like manually deleting them). As of right now we’ve not confirmed that’s actually the issue at hand.
IF the file had been deleted and you don’t have a dackup, your settings will indeed have gone.
Well I am up for exhausting every option before starting a new server. I guess I was hoping I could somehow get the server data needed out of the logs but I don’t think that is the case.
I don’t know how the file would have been deleted, but I am certain if it was done by me I would have known, unless somehow I accidentally did the deletion without knowing.
I appreciate the help given, but I think I am going to just start over this weekend and add my media to a new server. Unfortunately, I think somehow preferences file got deleted and I cannot recover it. Thanks for your help in trying!
hopefully someone has some ideas of how to proceed as I was hoping to not have to lose my metadata with a new server.