Server Version#: Version 1.16.5.1554
Freenas 11.2-U5
Hello everyone.
I’m actually here to post my problem, along with a solution to maybe aid others that come across the same issue.
I’ll point out, I do not like my solution, but it’s worked, so hopefully you may be able to shed some light on possible causes and better solutions.
I do not know why, but recently my plex server started acting up. if I viewed collections, then it would just say ‘error go to the forums’ or if I arranged by latest first it wouldn’t work either, but the normal alphabetical ordered library would be ok.
not long after (a couple of days maybe), all media became unavailable.
All the files were all still visible on a local network and logging into the server, but nothing was able to play. Plex’s error was “unavailable, ensure the drive is mounted and available” (or something like that)
I tried everything I could think of, for quite some time, but nothing seemed to work, I scoured the forums and never actually found a working solution.
it seemed to be a permission issue. after some digging, I discovered that wherever i mounted the media folder from the source location into the jail, that directory became hidden from the jail. if I unmounted the location, plex could see the folder again, so certainly a permissions issue, but I never discovered why. I even resorted to deleting the plex plugin on the FreeNAS (which also deleted the snapshot I had, so that was annoying!) but when installing fresh, the same issue plagued me.
Ultimately what I did to fix the issue was to go to where the media is stored via an SMB share in windows, and edit the permissions to give “everyone” read access. it took a while to do all the permission changes, but once it had completed the issue was resolved.
Very annoying, and I have absolutely no idea why I suddenly lost the permissions to access the files in plex but resolved it in what I consider to be a little sketchy but ultimately successful way…
