[Ubuntu 22.04] Unable to find media

[Zahj]

Server Version#: 1.28.2.6151-914ddd2b3
Player Version#: Web 4.87.2

This is my second time getting Plex up and running on my Ubuntu machine. I’m a complete novice at Linux and setting up Plex is among the projects that I’m using the learn. After messing up the permissions setup while trying to get file sharing to work, I recently wiped and did a fresh install of Ubuntu. During this current set up, I’ve got Samba set up to manage my file sharing and got Plex installed and running. I used this guide here: https://computingforgeeks.com/install-plex-media-server-ubuntu-debian/ to get my basic install going and also set up plex as a user and group for the directory that I use to hold my media. My machine currently has two hard drives, with the one that doesn’t hold the OS as my media drive. My movies and TV shows are stored at path /media//hdd/plex. This hard drive is mounted, which I verified using gparted.

When I use the ls -l command on my media storage directory, I get the following output

USER@Ubuntu-NAME:/media/USER/hdd/plex$ ls -l
total 8
drwxrwsr-x+ 2 plex plex 4096 Jun 21 20:01 movies
drwxrwsr-x+ 4 plex plex 4096 Jun 21 19:37 tv_shows
USER@Ubuntu-NAME:/media/USER/hdd/plex$

You can see that I’ve created a plex group and added the plex user to that group. However, despite the multiple days work I’ve put in to try and solve this problem, I’m unable to find any media in these directories from the plex app. Is it possible that when I set up Samba for this same directory that I somehow prevented other group or users from gaining access to the directory outside the root user?

Any help would be greatly welcome, but please keep in mind that my knowledge on using and navigating Linux and Ubuntu is very rudimentary.

[pshanew]

That “+” at the end of your permissions in the output above means that ACLs are being used for managing access to these files/folders. This is due to the drive being mounted into /media/USER by the udisks2 utility. ACLs trump normal Unix file permissions; no amount of chmod’ing or chown’ing will allow anyone other than your user to view those files and directories.

It is generally recommended that drives being used for Plex be mounted with dedicated mount points set up in /etc/fstab. There is fairly extensive documentation, with examples, in this how-to from these forums:

Linux Tips

Using other hard drives (Windows or Linux) with PMS This How-To is written to help with Internal and External drives. It also is written to demonstrate how to cope with NTFS and EXT4 formatted drives. By logical extension, any format supported by Linux can be handled using the technique shown here. In all cases, the goal is to give user plex permission to read your media files which Linux doesn’t allow by default due to its strict security model. We will walk through the steps needed …

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This is not recommended, but you can also modify the ACLs for that mount to allow access to another user or users using the setfacl utility. Something like:
sudo setfacl -m u:plex:rx /media/USER

The reason this isn’t recommended is that there are potential timing issues for the Plex service and when the disks are mounted by udisks2 which could cause media to be unavailable at the time Plex starts. Do yourself a favor and create static mounts now.