I have been using plex for years on my windows machine. As part of a larger upgrade I want to move the media files onto a Ubuntu server (I am on LTS 24 currently).
I have successfully installed Plex and I have been able to stream video files that are stored in my home directory (/home/<user./content). Ultimately I would like to store the files on a different directory that is stored on a mdadm raid 6 configuration (I have labeled this drive Snail and is mounted at /Snail in Ubuntu).
From what I have read so far in the forms it is a user rights problem. I have given Plex ownership of content folder on Snail as well as ownership of all the files in /Snail/content, when going through the plex interface (ip address/32400/web) and I create the library Plex does not see the directory /Snail at all. I can see /home//content without issue. From the user rights I see no difference between /Snail/content and /home//content and thus I can not explain why one works and the other does not.
For context, I have successfully gotten video to stream in my /home/ folder.
User rights on /home/ (the folder that works):
The user rights on /Snail (the folder that does not work):
And for full transparency the user rights of the Snail directory:
And for additional information, I have been able to remotely access the /Snail/content folder remotely using Samba.
Does Plex Media server work well with a Raided drive? Or am I missing something else?
The “magic” is making sure you setup the mount correctly.
Don’t put content in your /home directory. Home directories usually have more restrictions.
Using what you’ve shown, I recommend this:
Create a separate mount point directory (e.g. /Snail)
Make yourself owner
Set directory permissions 755 so you have full control and Plex has read
Now mount the RAID logical drive on /Snail
Again set your username as owner
Again apply 755 permissions
It would look like this in the shell (edit this to match your username and mdadm volume ID)
# Mount point directory
mkdir /Snail
chown jj48642:jj48642 /Snail
chmod 755 /Snail
# Now mount the array
mount /dev/md2 /Snail
chown -R jj48642:jj48642 /Snail
find /Snail -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /Snail -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
# Now edit /etc/fstab to (adjust this to match)
/dev/md2 /Snail <FS_TYPE> auto,defaults,rw 0 0
Please see here for more details.
The tip shows ext4 but works for anything supported by Linux
( I use xfs – more robust for large arrays like mine )
I really appreciate your response. I now know not to pay attention to the Raid pack.
From my understanding of Ubuntu permissions I gave the mount point /Snail full read and write to every user on the system (I know not the best security practice, but I am trying to identify the source of the problem.)
If I have full read-write access for all users and groups (as my screen shot suggests) why can plex not see the directory /Snail when I go into the browse function? (FYI: I also took your suggestion and changed the rights and this had no effect when viewing the computer via the web interface).
For more nuances, I have other applications using the same mount point that have other authorization requirements (a postgresql DB) so I can not use recursive changes to the ownership/authorizations on /Snail.
What rights does /Snail need to have for Plex to see the folder? I would anticipate that full read/write would allow the plex app to see the folder.
