Server Maintenance & Notification

Feature Suggestions
1

From time to time, I wish I could tell my Plex server to tell new user connections that it is down for maintenance, and automatically shut down once there nothing being played. Once down, the redirection service (my words for whatever connects outside users to the Plex server in my home) could continue to inform new user connections that the server is down for maintenance. This is different from a server that goes down due to a power or internet outage (and different from a server that is going down permanently, but none of us want that!)

I’ve seen some old (and closed) suggestions very similar to this that generally have someone asking, “Isn’t that what email is for?” I suppose, for those of you with your cell phone grafted to your hands and who always check you email any time your attention isn’t on some other shiny object, that’s great, But if I’m watching a TV show and feel like streaming the next episode, I’m highly unlikely to run into my computer room to check my email to see if my friend’s plex server is going to go down soon!

On the other hand, if my plex player displays a message that the server will be unavailable for a while due to maintenance after my show ends, I’d know immediately. This would prevent annoyed texts and emails from users to Plex Admins when they cannot access their favorite shows. :smile:

This seems like a simple function (from the outside) and as a programmer myself I know that the simplest seeming things are often the most complex to implement, so this may well be beyond the abilities of the Plex developers.

But I still have hope that this extremely useful, simple function will soon be part of the Plex server code.

2

There’s an existing and rather popular feature suggestion thread discussing an option to send server messages to users. I suggest you comment/vote in that thread in order to avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes.

The closed suggestions you found should already be pointing to that thread – if they don’t, please let me know.

Unless I’m missing some unique aspect of your suggestion, I’ll close this thread as a duplicate.

3

Thanks @tom80H , I did as you said, though when I discovered that the thread is ten years old I kinda lost hope that Plex would ever bother to implement the suggestion. Apparently votes don’t count as much as what is easy or, more likely, “fun & cool.” Sigh.

4

I use the following through the Tautulli API as part of my automated backup Powershell process. It’ll end all active streaming and display a specific message to your users. It won’t help if they try to access the server while it’s already down, though.

LogMessage "Tautulli - Query for Running Stream Sessions"
$tautullisessions
try {
	$tautullisessions = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "http://Precious:8181/api/v2?apikey=XXXXX&cmd=get_activity" | ConvertFrom-Json | Select-Object).response.data.sessions
	
	LogMessage (Indent ("Tautulli Sessions Detected: " + ($tautullisessions).Count))
	foreach($tautullisession in $tautullisessions)
	{		
		$result = (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri ("http://Precious:8181/api/v2?apikey=XXXXX&cmd=terminate_session&session_key=" + $tautullisession.session_key + "&message=Automatic Backup - ETA 30 Minutes"))
		LogMessage (Indent("Ended session: " + $tautullisession.friendly_name + " / " + $tautullisession.full_title))
	}
	
}
catch
{
	LogMessage (Indent "Tautulli - Unable to query for sessions")
}
5

2022 clean-up: duplicate