Okay, I installed it on a mac and it did the spinning wheel and “Intializing Plex Server,” with and “app.plex.tv” address, I clicked on the Plex Icon on the top bar and clicked preferences and it popped up a local address with my server (the http://127.0.0.1:32400/web/ address Plex Media server should be running/in the top bar.) Good luck.
Thanks. Stuck back in the ‘not authorized’ hellhole. Tried deleting all the folders and trying again, tried the migration folders now that I know the right place to put them - nada. Not Authorized.
Is there a way to disable the server claiming for this account? I don’t really care about security, the main purpose for this machine is to run plex. If it gets hacked and dies, it dies. Is there a way to get around this claiming infinite loop?
(remote access is not something I’m interested in, this is a intranet-only deployment)
No, but you probably need to claim the server. I would go to https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/devices/pms and delete all the servers you don’t want. Then try to reclaim this one, or do a search on “claim plex server,” a lot of pages showed up, one of them might work for you.
Yeah, I’ve tried this claiming thing ad-nauseum. I think unfortunately plex has reached the end of its’ usefulness Pivoted to another platform and I was up and running inside an hour. I should have cut anchor sooner. Not as polished and I’m not seeing comm skip feature but so far everything works and it feels snappier with live tv and navigating libraries, so I guess that’s a small price to pay.
I definitely got my money’s worth from the plex pass lifetime but it seems disingenuous to call it a ‘lifetime subscription’ when the only viable solution is to delete my account and pay again due to these new ‘security’ features. Thanks for trying to help though, I really do appreciate it.
@illegalgardener Deleting your Plex account should never be needed. Using Chuck’s claim tool and providing your server logs would have allowed us to troubleshoot. Without that info its hard to provide any specific information beyond the troubleshooting guides.
Don’t try anything too drastic. PMS for Mac has a couple of quirks that you ran into.
I’m sorry that you went so far as fresh install of Sequoia, but it’s for the better I’m sure.
Here’s what you can do to fix your problem and have a nice weekend: (I just tried it)
- Use
delpms.shto completely remove PMS for Mac completely, and please follow the onscreen last two steps the script can’t automate. - Once you do that, you can be confident a new install of PMS for Mac will not be locking you out on the plex.tv authorization level, nor by cruft locally.
- When you do get around to the fresh install of PMS for Mac, beware of the initial gotcha I don’t know if they ever totally solved, which is the initial setup url you are taken to in Safari doesn’t launch anything. You just get a spinner. Very frustrating, but after figuring it out months ago, I’ve posted about it and learned the answer: The spinner is a false flag. It’s not actually in progress. You have to click into the URL and press Enter on your keyboard to actually GO to the web address, lol.
- I’ve had the most success actually going up to the proper setup URL => http://127.0.0.1:32400/web which was the correct first URL to access. I do not use the menubar context menu you described. Safari is my default browser, and it is open and logged into Plex.tv when I’m installing PMS for testing. Below is
delpms.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
rm -rf /Applications/Plex\ Media\ Server.app && echo '[1/5] deleted the app'
rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.plexapp.plexmediaserver.plist && echo '[2/5] deleted the plist'
rm -rf ~/Library/Logs/Plex\ Media\ Server && echo '[3/5] deleted the logs'
rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/PlexMediaServer && echo '[4/5] deleted the caches'
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Plex\ Media\ Server && echo '[5/5] deleted the application support'
echo 'Two manual steps are required to remove all traces of PMS on your Mac.'
echo ' * Use the link to remove the Mac from your Authorized Devices - Server.'
echo ' * Empty your Trash and restart the Mac.'
echo ' '
echo ' https://app.plex.tv/desktop#!/settings/devices/pms'
echo ' '
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Happy to provide the log, but as I don’t have access to the server UI I only have the text file, and it’s quite long. Is there a specific section from the log I can pasta or do you want the whole thing? I thought I saw some personal info in there so I may redact a thing or two…
As for chuck’s thing, that looks like it’s for linux, no? This is on mac so please forgive my ignorance, I didn’t see anything in there looking actionable.
And com skip is apparently not an option for plan-B so I would be happy to come back to plex, I just couldn’t keep fighting with it while hearing the complaint department in my house
Thank you, going to give this a shot tonight!!
Sounds good. I did get the spinner and had to use 127.0.0.1 manually and am fairly confident the careful set of steps will get you up. There were a couple of versions of Safari they fixed it fwiw 
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I completely understand, that is why I asked about providing a zip of the server logs quite often you need to bounce between several log files to get a good picture of what is going on. Log excerpts tend to no contain the needed info.
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My bad, it’s easy to glaze over details when I’m frustrated. You guys owe me nothing, so I just wanted to point out how grateful I am to have your support. Will revisit after a beer or three.
Hey- I looked at the Chuck thing more carefully and realized I can take a swing with it in Mac. Just followed the instructions best I could and got the following:
Last login: Mon Dec 16 07:39:47 on ttys000
redacted username ~ % sudo sh
Password:
sh-3.2# chmod +x /Users/Shared/UserCredentialReset.sh
sh-3.2# /Users/Shared/UserCredentialReset.sh
grep: /proc/1/cgroup: No such file or directory
grep: /proc/1/cgroup: No such file or directory
grep: /proc/1/cgroup: No such file or directory
Unrecognized host type. Cannot continue.
sh-3.2#
Any ideas? I followed all the other steps above to clean out plex and did a fresh PMS install, same unauthorized problem, whether localhost, 127, etc. Walked through the Chuck instructions line by line, tried placing in several different directories, same problem. With the hope of maintaining some level of anonymity I will need to scrub the logs before sharing, my name is the computer name and I’d prefer not to share that here because it’s all over those logs.
@ChuckPa Any assistance in running that script? Im not a macOS user
Plex Media Server.zip (234.0 KB)
Here are the logs. I appreciate you looking into this.
I figured out the claim code is a 20 character alpha that I’m pretty sure aligns with a ‘token’ I found in the plex plist. Tried doing what I believe at least some of this Chuck script is doing, manually, and am getting the same ‘not authorized’ result.
Any help you could lend in just starting over would be greatly appreciated. I can’t believe the hoops I need to jump through to get past this ‘unauthorized’ issue. This might be the most poorly design ‘safeguard’ I have ever encountered.
In the meantime, it is worth noting is that the alternative software I’m running in the meantime really isn’t suitable long-term. I could live with it if I had no choice but overall it sucks compared to plex, so I’d really love to find some way to sort this out. If someone could tell me for sure that deleting my entire account and starting a new one and buying another plex pass would solve the issue, I could live with it. If I took the price of a plex pass and divide by the 12-15 hours I’ve already wasted , it’s a no brainer from a time cost opportunity perspective.
Buying a new plex pass/account will 100% NOT work.
Looking thru your logs, are you using a local router or are you connected directly to your modem?
I am seeing a 422 error:
Dec 16, 2024 12:30:33.760 [0x16d9a3000] DEBUG - [HttpClient/HCl#22] HTTP/1.1 (0.2s) 422 response from POST https://plex.tv/servers.xml?auth_token=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (reused)
Do you have chrome installed? try visiting http://127.0.0.1:32400/web using chrome to see if that changes what is going on. I will keep looking at your logs.
Gotcha. Just figured it’s worth mentioning that if throwing money at the problem will solve it, I’d have no regrets doing so.
Chrome yielded same not authorized result.
Connected via router. It is a managed network. Prior to installing, I moved my port forwarding rules to point to the new Mac mini where Plex resides, though I figured that would only pertain to remote access. I tried disabling the port forwarding and nothing changed.
Opening the standalone plex app, or accessing via web - everything’s fine with the base account, accessing web etc. Is there something at the router level in addition to NAT port forwarding I should be doing?
Reason I asked is that the local IP of your mac is showing as your WAN address. Starting with 69.x
You might check your router’s IP scope. See Private network - Wikipedia
Nope, not the WAN address, that’s just the network segment hardwired machines live on. Unfortunately 255 is a thing otherwise that network segment would be 69.420.x.x 
69.420.xxx.xxx is a public address. it does not follow the RFC for a private network. Your LAN IPs should follow the RFC, see I can No longer Access or even Create a Plex Server On my Account? - #5 by dane22
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Weird, because the address for this new server is just 1 off from the old server in the fourth octet. This is part of a multi-site managed network, I will give it a 192. and vlan it with the other stuff it needs, and see what happens.
If this does solve the issue, sounds like it may just be for this initial auth step. Plex has lived for many years in that IP scheme on a Windows box just one digit away from this machine, so that would have never occurred to me. Will get back to you asap, thanks again for all your help
