Plex failed to start: Read/write access is required for path

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

I’m running Plex on Ubuntu Server 18.04. I run under my username instead of the default ‘plex’ username (reason was that transcoding REFUSED to work otherwise). That meant I had to run chown -R myuser:myuser /usr/lib/plexmediaserver.

I just upgraded Plex and now the server won’t start. When I run sudo journalctl -xe | grep -i plex, there’s the output I get:

Feb 22 17:36:27 ubuntu-server Plex Media Server[6309]: PMS: failure detected. Read/write access is required for path: /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server
Feb 22 17:36:27 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Feb 22 17:36:27 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Feb 22 17:36:32 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart.
Feb 22 17:36:32 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 3.
-- Automatic restarting of the unit plexmediaserver.service has been scheduled, as the result for
Feb 22 17:36:32 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: Stopped Plex Media Server.
-- Subject: Unit plexmediaserver.service has finished shutting down
-- Unit plexmediaserver.service has finished shutting down.
Feb 22 17:36:32 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Feb 22 17:36:32 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: plexmediaserver.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Feb 22 17:36:32 ubuntu-server systemd[1]: Failed to start Plex Media Server.
-- Subject: Unit plexmediaserver.service has failed
-- Unit plexmediaserver.service has failed.

I already checked /var/lib/plexmediaserver/Library/Application Support/Plex Media Server (and /var/lib/plexmediaserver), both are owned by myuser.

PLEASE help me figure out what’s wrong.

2

Show me the overwrite file please and the ls -la /var/lib/plexmediaserver

3

I don’t know which (if any) files were overridden when I upgraded.

Output of ls -la /var/lib/plexmediaserver:

drwxr-xr-x  4 myuser myuser 4096 Feb  4 17:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 52 root root 4096 Feb 17 11:30 ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 myuser myuser 4096 Feb  4 17:34 Library
drwxr-xr-x  2 myuser myuser 4096 Feb  5 18:03 tmp_transcoding

/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/lib/plexmediaserver.service:

User=myuser
Group=myuser
4

Thanks. Now i know what’s happening.

  1. We don’t modify /usr/lib/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service
  2. We modify it in `/etc/systemd/system/plexmediaserver.service.d/override.conf

May I direct you to as the next step?

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5

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