After 4-5 years of using this service on a very old WHS2011 machine I have finally upgraded my Home Server, sorta. I went from a old Q6600 and a BFG NVIDIA nForce mobo (just died), to a Asus Intel based board with a Intel Xeon E5450 with quadruple the ram and twice the SATA ports. I also decided to upgrade to Server 2016 and hope that works for the next 5 years or so. I also upgraded the old OS hard drive to a Samsung 850 Pro. And just wow this feels way better already.
However, its been so long that I can’t remember how to set this all up, lol. Do I need to install PMS first and spend a little bit of time getting it set up before I install the 1.1.7 service wrapper? I have not even installed PMS yet, so I assume I need to install that and have the Server actually signed in for the process? I have not created any accounts, still on the true Administrator account too. Is that OK? Or do I need a user account for 1.1.7 service wrapper to work? Also, can I do all this in RDP (Remmina) from my Linux Mint, or should I actually do this at the Server itself? I yet again plan on it being headless so the gpu will be removed once everything is up and running.
Also, is there a full guide for this service wrapper, or is it self explanatory? Lol, lots of questions. Thanks again
Rod
EDIT: Wow, sa2000 you still here after all this time? Nice to see you again.
EDIT2: Never mind, it just worked straight away, I didn’t need a user account or anything special as it just works with my Admin account out of the box. Thanks again @cjmurph
I have PMS running on Win 10 Pro. I have a separate Plex specific non administrator account which I set up and which PMS was installed under. Immediately after install, before starting up PMS I ran the PMSservice app from the link above.
When PMS is running as a service, PMS Service keeps stopping every 3 minutes and then restarts. If I manually stop the PMS Service and exit, then start up the normal PMS within the same account, it runs absolutely fine and doesn’t stop at all.
How can I get PMS as a Service to stop falling over?
If you are using multiple windows accounts and use a different account to install Plex Media Server under from the account you run the Plex Service under then please see this post to ensure you do not end up with multiple instances of Plex Media Server.exe running - one as a service and one as not
Other than that would need logs and checking to windows task manager with run as adminstrator to see what is running
I’m experiencing a problem where I’m trying to change the user running PMS as a service from the default user I used to install it with (admin privileges). I’ve tried modifying the permissions of the AppData folders (which have been moved to the c:\ root, but still no joy. The PMS process never starts unless I run the service as ME. I tried the above quoted steps, with no joy.
I have 2 windows accounts - an admin account i use for the service tray app and all installs and uninstalls and updates and a separate account that is not admin and that is the account i run the service in. On one of my systems, the app data is defaulted to that within the service account and would be within %LocalAppData% for that account so no need to worry about permissions. On another machine i do have the app data on dedicated drive and i made sure that the plex account has full permissions to that area and of course the LocalAppDataPath registry entry for the plex user would have the path for the dedicated drive eg D:\PlexData
And to ensure i do not end up with two instances running - i edit the registry after every update to remove the Run entry within the current user area (the admin account)
Thanks for sharing your technique. Here are excerpts of the errors I’m seeing:
The specific error I’m receiving is:
a whole bunch of these:
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:23.312 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 7 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:24.641 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 6 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:26.299 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 5 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:27.628 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 4 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:29.317 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 3 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:30.646 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 2 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:32.351 [5616] DEBUG - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in is starting, waiting 1 seconds for it to complete.
Sep 04, 2018 00:40:33.743 [5616] ERROR - [com.plexapp.system] Plug-in took too long to start, returning error.
This is showing error code 2 which i presume would be this windows error 2 (0x2) ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND (The system cannot find the file specified.)
Can you see if the install went wrong and if all these exist
C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\PlexScriptHost.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\Resources\Plug-ins-21ab172de\Framework.bundle\Contents\Resources\Versions\2\Python\bootstrap.py
C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\Resources\Plug-ins-21ab172de\Fanart-TV.bundle
and also login within the windows account that the plex media server service runs in and see if these directories are accessible
Correct. c:\Plex Data\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Logs\Plex Media Server.log
Which matches what is in the Server Settings (if I could access it, I’d screenshot it).
None of them exist, but that may be due to trying to remove the current version for a rollback (that went horribly wrong, apparently). Stuck in a “reboot required” loop. I don’t know if they existed before I attempted the uninstall early this morning.
may be you did the install whilst plex processes were running and end up with indeterminate state. Always check task manager
installs have two stages - removing old version and installing new version. Sometimes deletion is set pending a reboot and that could arise if the files were locked because a process was left running
if it is outside the localappdata for the user - you did not really need to add AppData\Local to the path since it is not within the %LocalAppData% path for the user
Noted, I but I like to keep it there to remind myself where it was originally pulled from.
While I’ve been following the same upgrade process for the last year and a half, it’s possible. Do you have a suggestion on moving forward to clear the “Reboot required” error?
Are you doing all the installs / uninstalls using the admin windows account?
A reboot results in the server restarting - so first my advice would be to stop the service and uninstall the Plex Media Server Service wrapper program to get Plex Media Server itself in a sane state before bringing back the service
Then check the registry for any user you login into and make sure there is no entry HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Plex Media Server
Then you can go through the reboot sequence and try to go through an uninstall of Plex Media Server through Add or Remove Programs
Make sure you do not have any explorer window with any folders within theC:\Program Files (x86)\Plex area active
Then reboot and install current version manually (all this to be done using the admin account)
Then close it and not click launch and make sure this is deleted HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Plex Media Server
Then login to the plex account in windows and check that you did not leave this set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\Plex Media Server
Then test out launching and running Plex Media Server in this account outside the service wrapper - this checks that you have permissions / paths correct
So Start / Run and find the Plex Media Server.exe and run it
see if all works
check the Plex system tray icon and see it still does not have start automatically on login
Then select Exit and that should terminate Plex Media Server processes
Then logout and switch back to your admin account and now install the Plex Media Server Service wrapper and the service tray program and configure the service to run with the plex account
e.g. computername\plex
Update: A combination of the windows uninstall fixer and installing a beta release got my functionality back, so now I can start working on actually getting the service account to run the PMS as a service correctly.
EDIT: I ran the PlexService service as a local admin (I was running it as a domain admin before) and I’m still getting the same slew of errors.
EDIT2: I’m not entirely sure how the service scripts are programmed, but I am unable to run the PMS.exe as a standalone application. I don’t know when this started or if this is normal behavior when the service is installed, even when disabled. I wanted to do this to t-shoot if I was able to run the PMS standalone under different credentials, but the only way anything works if with my credentials entered for the service, and using the service.
I wanted to see if HW decode helped with LiveTV quality while watching football (see other thread I started, it doesn’t).
That meant I had to stop running PMS as a service since PLEX introduced a bug back around May that causes PMS to crash if HW acceleration is enabled and it’s running as a service.
After digging around I found this, Auto Login for Windows.
I simply disabled the Plex Service (Manage->Services and Applications->Services->PlexService DISABLE).
Reboot
Install Auto Logon linked above and provide your credentials and set the PMS executable to start on login
Reboot
I set my autolock timer to a couple minutes as doing this can present problems on easily accessible machines. Mine runs headless in a closet so I’m not very worried.
I just wanted to let you guys know that this works “as advertised” on Windows Server 2016 Standard out of the box.
I’ve also previously used it successfully on a Server 2016 Standard install with Server Essentials Role installed, so I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work on the integrated “Server 2016 Essentials” variant. (I’ve actually only ever heard of issues on Server Essentials 2012/2016 when using Plex Connect as they share a port mapping by default, but figured I’d mention it anyway).
I believe there is an extra step(s) for server 2016.
Take a look in the thread below… It’s about half way down the page.
Scroll to the post by killercowuk
The solution should be everything in that post.
Personally like @Smokindog I’m using W10 nowadays and it works fine.
But I do recall back when using Server 2012 i had to take similar steps.
This may in fact work, but I’m using Server 2016 in a domain environment, and his solution doesn’t work in that case. I’ve encountered his response before when looking for a solution… but alas, it doesn’t work. To be fair, he does open his post by limiting to a standalone, non-domain joined machine.
