Ubuntu Plex No Write Access to Destination

[mrosenecker]

I am having a problem with my Ubuntu 18.04 server, running Plex. I have the DVR configured to send shows to my TV Shows library, but each time I try to record something, I get the dreaded “No write access to destination” error message. Before I get the 200 responses that say, “did you do a search in the forums?”, yes. Here’s what I have:

1. Plex is running as a VM on an ESXi server. Ubuntu 18.04 is the OS for the VM, and it has a 100GB drive for sda (boot, binaries, and all other essential Linux stuff) and a 2.5TB drive for sdb (Plex media library).
2. sdb1 is mounted as /Plex as follows: /dev/sdb1 on /Plex type ext4 (rw,relatime,data=ordered)
3. /Plex has the following permissions: drwxrwxrwx+ 12 root plex 4.0K Mar 8 18:40 Plex
4. TV shows are stored in a subdirectory /Plex/TV Shows, which has the same permissions as /Plex

I have done some additional troubleshooting. Namely, I have confirmed that the plexmediaserver service is running as the plex user. The plex user is a member of the plex group. From the CLI, I can do a ‘sudo -u plex’ and create files, delete files, rename files in the /Plex/TV Shows directory.

Anyone have any other ideas? It doesn’t appear to be a permissions issue, the mount is writeable, but I still can’t record anything…

Thanks in advance!

Mark

[mrosenecker]

Anyone? Suggestions?

[ChuckPa]

Did you give user plex:plex , via group or user, permission to write to the library storage area you told it to record?

Give a look here please. Using inheritance helps a lot with DVR and continuing to allow your username to maintain control of the media.

Automating Linux permissions using inheritance (Helps DVR)

Linux has a very powerful and convenient way of automatically setting the permissions of your media files as you add more to your media directories. Linux allows only one username and one group to own a file which is somewhat of a restriction. This can be easily leveraged to accomplish what is needed for Plex. An excellent application of this is when you wish to record with Plex DVR, allowing it to write directly into your library, while you retain full permission / control of your media. …

[mrosenecker]

user and group are both set to plex, owner of the folder is also plex. Directory attributes are drwxrwxrwx+ (yes, I know that this is abnormally WIDE open to everyone, but in my efforts to troubleshoot, I wanted to eliminate permissions as a possible source of problems.)

This is ridiculously frustrating. I’ve had this working in the past, but for the life of me, I can’t get it to work!

[mrosenecker]

I think I figured it out. So, while the DIRECTORY permissions were fine (actually, a bit OVER permissive), there was a subfolder within my TV Shows library that was named ‘.grab’

This folder had incorrect permissions on it. Since I didn’t have any existing recordings to worry about, I deleted the folder and tried recording again. Viola! It’s working great!