Server Disappears every 24 hours or so. Reboot PC brings it back.

General Discussions
1

Hey everyone,
Since about the 1.2.4 updates, my server has been disappearing about once a day. I don’t see any logs in the crash reports and unsure where else to look. The server continues to run with the little plex icon in the notification area there, but if I try to go to localhost.whatever it can’t be found. Logging in to plex.tv just shows me my friends server he shared with me.

All I have to do is reboot the PC (I have plex load on startup) and everything works great for a little while, usually the rest of the evening, and then at some point throughout the day it happens again and I’ll have to reboot for the next evenings binge watch.

Is there a way to roll back to an older version of a server? Do I just backup the Media, Metadata, and Thumbnails in the Plex Media Server folder, then Uninstall, install from an older package and copy those folders back to retain all my current settings?

It’s driving me crazy.

Thanks for any help

Joel.

2

Which OS are you on? Can you provide logs?

4

@trumpy81 said:
Assuming you are using Windows 10,

  1. Right Click on the Start button and then click on ‘Device Manager’
  2. Under Network Adapters look for your MB’s NIC and then double click it
  3. In the dialogue that opens, click on the Power Management Tab
  4. Uncheck the ‘Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power’

Hopefully, that should stop Plex from disconnecting from the network.

I’m not sure if this is the answer but it was checked so I unchecked it. But I could see how that would do it. The network appears to go away and server disappears, and then for some reason plex doesn’t see it when it comes back until everything is reset…Not sure thats it but I’ll report back.

thanks!!

5

@Night said:
Which OS are you on? Can you provide logs?

Windows 10, and I’m unsure exactly which log file to grab? There’s lots in the “logs” folder and none of which seem to throw up a red flag that I see. It’s like the server just disappears, no warning signs, nothing seemingly caused it and then on reboot everything works like normal.

I do think it could be what was suggested above, that the NIC was going to sleep and causing issues. I’ve disabled that so we’ll see how the uptime goes now.

6

@joelhoekstra said:

@Night said:
Which OS are you on? Can you provide logs?

Windows 10, and I’m unsure exactly which log file to grab?

Settings → Server → Help → Download Logs

7

Might be NIC, logs should say more.

Check this KB
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250417-Plex-Media-Server-Log-Files

Windows

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Plex Media Server\Logs\

Plex Media Server.log is the one I’m looking for.

8

I’ve rebooted this morning and all seems to be working for now. We shall see. Nothing stood out in the log to me but I’m not sure what I’m looking for either so…

9

From a quick scan on my phone of that file, I can see no reason in plex for this issue, I would assume it is on your windows computer.

Check power settings as has been said before
A long shot by might also be a networking issuse with dhcp, upnp. If it is not a power issue we can look in to that

Are you sure you have to reboot can not force close plex from cmd and restart it?

 TASKKILL /F /IM plex.exe /T

replace plex.exe with plex executable, I’ve always run on plex on linux so I do not know which executable it is running on under windows.

10

Wierd. I had just killed the task and restarted the server application and thought it was working fine. I could open plex, see my server and navigate the library, so I left it at that. Well i tried to play something and it just spun and spun and did nothing. (At this point I should have looked at the log, oops)

I restarted the PC and voila, all is well. Now possibly it could still be from the power settings in the NIC since I hadn’t had a restart since changing that earlier this evening. So I guess NOW we wait and see what happens. I’ll try and remember to check the logs before rebooting next time…unless there’s another log…but I checked the Plex Media Server.log and it only has data since the reboot.

11

If you grab the logs the way @trudge mentioned above, that will grab all the logs. The log from before the restart would then be in there.

Edit - Looking at the current log after the restart won’t help unless it is exhibiting the problem again.

12

So it was working after a reboot last night. This morning the server had disappeared again. This time however, right clicking on the icon, clicking Exit, and then restarting the server application did fix it. I then proceeded to hop on to plex and download the logs.

Here’s the resulting .zip file.

Thanks for any help guys. I appreciate it.

13

Still happening, looks like I will attempt to roll back a few versions and see

14

Here is a log from this morning, now occasionally the server will stay up, can be navigated, all that but just spins when selecting a video.

15

1.2.7 just dropped and it looks like it should fix the issue.

16

@joelhoekstra - Do you have the following setting enabled? If not, enable it and see if it helps.

Settings \ Server \ Network \ Enable local network discovery (GDM)

17

@MovieFan.Plex said:
@joelhoekstra - Do you have the following setting enabled? If not, enable it and see if it helps.

Settings \ Server \ Network \ Enable local network discovery (GDM)

I do have that enabled. So far since the 1.2.7 update its been good…however I’ve only had that running for about 6 hours…so we shall see.

18

Running v1.2.7 on CentOS and it crashed a couple times last night already.

19

@deusxanime said:
Running v1.2.7 on CentOS and it crashed a couple times last night already.

Saw this on both CentOS 7 and Ubuntu on 1.2.7. When it happens, Plex essentially 100% dies. Even running a “service plexmediaserver restart” hangs. I’ve triggered this when watching a video in the web browser, iOS, and Xbox One

Log from when it crashed. The 14:36 is when I tried to restart it (service plexmediaserver restart hung forever):

…

Log when trying to restart server (before I kill -9 the plex process):

Log from when the server finally restarted (had to run service plexmediaserver start):

20

2 solid days with 1.2.7 and still humming a long. Longest uptime in the last month