Hi,
I’ve been running my Plex media server for years with no issues. However, last Sunday 27/10 I suddenly lost access. I followed a guide that instructed me to remove certain properties from Preferences.xml and reclaim the server by tunneling in so the browser would appear to be accessing from the VM itself - which worked, until today. I tried doing the same again, but unsuccessfully.
It seems like my server is no longer able to communicate with plex.tv, but I’m not sure what has changed. Any help would be appreciated!
I made sure plex:plex was set as owner for the entire Cache hierarchy (and checked that all other folders had the same owner), then tried starting the server to see if it downloaded the certificate, but it didn’t.
Sadly, it did not work. After restarting the server, it just put PlexOnlineToken=“” back into the Preferences.xml file.
Earlier, I tried using the UserCredentialReset.sh tool, but it seems to have a similar problem. The section that queries the plex.tv api for the token using curl, fails with Error: 60, which , after a bit of searching, does suggest a certificate problem on my server.
Before writing my initial post, I came across a suggestion that the server time could be an issue, and this whole thing did indeed start the day after switching from daylight savings time. I found that the server was off by one hour and using the wrong timezone, so I switched it to the correct timezone and restarted. It’s now accurate to <1 second, from what I can tell, but It didn’t seem to make any difference.
plex@dingo-plexvm:~$ timedatectl status
Local time: Mon 2024-11-04 00:35:41 CET
Universal time: Sun 2024-11-03 23:35:41 UTC
RTC time: Sun 2024-11-03 23:35:41
Time zone: Europe/Copenhagen (CET, +0100)
System clock synchronized: yes
NTP service: active
RTC in local TZ: no
plex@dingo-plexvm:~$ curl -X POST 'http://127.0.0.1:32400/myplex/claim?token=claim-BxdrUJZY4x8t6T9Sd-wP'
<html><head><title>Internal Server Error</title></head><body><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></body></html>
Possibly it would be easier to reinstall the entire thing and hope that fixes whatever the issue is, but I recently got hw transcoding to work, so I would like to avoid that.
I went ahead and reinstalled the server. Backed it up and started over with basically the same setup, and it now seems back to normal.
It would’ve been nice to learn what had gone wrong, but I had eventually spent 5x the time it’d take to reinstall, trying to locate the problem. Everything we tried pointed to an issue with certificates, but nothing I tried in that regard made any difference, so I chose the easy way out.
