i am running plex on a qnap ts-251b. i first set it up about seven months ago, and would use it to stream to my samsung tv. i’ve never had any problems with it.
the other day, i turned on my qnap, started the plex app on my tv, and my plex server was not displayed in the ui. i wanted to see whether the problem was with my tv, or with my server, so i pulled up plex web on my laptop, and the library categories all showed empty thumbnails, with the label “unavailable”.
i found a few similar forum topics, one of which said to go to the plex web settings page, and remove the plex server from “authorized devices”. i did that.
now, whenever i try to navigate to the web ui for my plex server, i get the following screen:
since the error message is terribly vague and unhelpful, i have no idea what to do next. i’ve found a few other forum topics, but they haven’t had useful solutions.
i’ve uninstalled the plex app in the qnap control panel, rebooted, and then reinstalled plex (using the manual qpkg installation wizard) but i keep winding up at the same spot.
i have changed nothing about my network, my qnap configuration, or my plex configuration between the last time it worked, and now. my qnap’s date and time are accurate. dns is accurate, and i can resolve public dns names from the qnap ssh console. i have updated my qnap to the latest firmware, and the plex qpkg is the latest version from plex.tv
as a matter of fact, yes, that worked – it took me to the setup page, with the “got it” button, and it prompted me for setup. i added my libraries, and it began to populate.
then i was able to navigate to my nas’s fqdn in the url and it pulled up the library properly, as well.
can you tell me what you saw in the server logs that led you to suggest i use the ip address instead of the fqdn? i’m running windows server in an esxi vm, with active directory and dns hosted on it. name resolution throughout my network is working normally and i didn’t make any network/dns changes in the time between when plex last worked, and when it stopped, so i’m stumped.
yeah, i’d seen that too. please note that in the logs, my actual fqdn is displayed – i.e., “MYFQDN” is just a placeholder i used while sanitizing the logs before posting them online.
with that having been said, i still don’t see what the problem could be. again, this issue arose spontaneously. why had it been working for over half a year, then stop? how could the issue persist even after plex server uninstalls?
i’d like to figure out what went wrong, since it seems as though i ought to expect this to recur at some indeterminate point in the future.
That’s hard to say, but unavailable generally refers to storage being offline for whatever reason, hung process, busy network or cpu, general weirdness that’s often temporary, including Plex authorization hiccups. Occasionally we get attempt to resolve things and the issue escalates. It’s good to remember that a lot of Internet things fail from Xmas to New Years when people are AFK.
When you uninstalled PMS using the AppCenter, you removed everything. I wouldn’t expect the issue to persist.
When you install a fresh PMS, you have to connect to it using http://local.ip.address:32400/web to do the initial setup. That’s all that happened to you recently from what I can tell. I can’t see back into why it originally said “Unavailable” as those logs weren’t included. When it happened to me I just power cycled my QNAP.
To claim a server, you need to access it from the same IP Net, and that net has to be in the private address space range, since otherwise, access will be denied to the setup pages
