Windows Plex Server Missing Agents on Settings > Server > Agents tabs

General Discussions
1

First off, I have searched the forums and troubleshooting pages and can’t find an answer to what is happening. I’ve been a Plex Pass member since the early days, perhaps 4 years now. I have 2 servers, one is on Winblows 7 and the other is on a QNAP NAS running some flavor of Linux. Both servers access the same repository on the NAS.

At some point I began having matching issues with the Win7 box. Things like weird posters pulled from a scene within the movie or a blank box with the Plex arrow in it in the TV library. The QNAP server is flawless. So I figured I had something jacked in the config of the Win7 server and could easily compare the 2 and get it working the same.

As I began comparing the 2 servers I noticed that the Win7 machine has substantially less agents than the working QNAP server did. TheTVDB tab only had TheTVDB and Plex Theme Music on it. The QNAP server has 5 more agents!

I upgraded to the latest version of Plex but that didn’t help. There was an error during the process about a folder not being correct or something like that that my sleep and beer addled index finger ignored it and obviously I can’t remember it.

So… Any Ninjas got any ideas WTF I can do to get out of this without a rip and replace of this?

2
  • deinstall Plex (your Plex database is not affected by this)
  • restart Windows
  • erase all files from within C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server
  • erase all files from within C:\Users\[your-windows-user-name]\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\Plug-ins CAREFUL: only Plug-ins, not Plug-in Support This erases all channels too, so do make a safety backup of it to restore some channels if you need to.
  • Make sure your Windows 7 has Service Pack 1 installed and all security-related Windows Updates as well
  • download https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/download/details.aspx?id=49984 (‘x86’ version) and install it. Make sure to note down any error messages if they appear.
  • install the latest Plex Server version
3

I followed this exactly and it made no difference. Any other ideas?

4

Could you please post screenshots from the Windows machine, showing the Agent configuration?

Also please do the following:

  1. activate debug logging (not ‘verbose’!)
  2. quit Plex Server
  3. wait 1 minute
  4. empty the log folder
  5. start Plex Server
  6. wait 2 minutes
  7. play a video for 1 minute
  8. wait 2 minutes
  9. shut down Plex server
  10. wait 1 minute
  11. zip up the whole log folder and attach it here
5

I didn’t try to play anything after the reinstall. Guess what, now nothing plays. Plex says that the drives aren’t mounted. “please check the files exists and the necessary drive is mounted”

6

I didn’t get the entire logs folder the first time. Here it is.

7

Could you please dive into C:\Program Files (x86)\Plex\Plex Media Server\Resources\Plug-ins-cece46d\
and count how many .bundle subfolders are in there?

What are drive letters S,M,U,V,T: ? Networked drives / NAS?
If these are USB drives, check whether their drive letters have changed or were even swapped around.

8

What kind of anti virus are you using?
I see massive errors in all components of Plex server.
Is your drive C: something special, like a pooled drive (ReFS) or a SSD cached drive?

9

Otto,

After some time I could play videos again. There seems to be a lag after an upgrade before the system is happy again. I’ve seen this before but it was taking a long time so I mentioned it. Perhaps it’s related to the massive errors you mentioned.

There are 20 bundles in the Plug-ins-cece46d folder.

I use Avast AV.

The drive letters are all mapped to volumes on my NAS so they don’t change. C: is an SSD drive. I’m not using any caching or ReFS.

What log file is showing the errors? If I understand things a little more I may be able to do a little of my own troubleshooting.

Also, Thank You Very Much for your help with this!

10

@bonserk said:
I use Avast AV.

I think I saw some reports about Avast hating Plex.
Go into the preferences of Avast and disable the ‘Web Shield’ part of Avast.
Then restart PMS and take a look at the agents page. If there are more agents now, you know the culprit.

It may also be a good idea to forbid Avast to scan for viruses in the Plex Data folder
C:\Users\ken\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server\
Create an excemption in the preferences of Avast.

What log file is showing the errors? If I understand things a little more I may be able to do a little of my own troubleshooting.

There are errors in the main log Plex Media Server.log
and also in pretty much every plugin log (those located in the subfolder, search for the term CRITICAL)

11

I have been trouble shooting the Avast aspect of this to see if it makes any difference. After each of the PMS restarts I looked in the Plex Media Server.log for errors. I noted about how long it took for errors to start to appear so I didn’t get a false good result. I also looked at the server agents to see if there were any additional agents.

I excluded the folders as suggested. S,M,U,V,T: mappings to my NAS and C:\Users\ken\AppData\Local\Plex Media Server. The network error went away but I still didn’t have the tv agents that are missing. So a minor victory but still no AGENTS!

The next steps were:

  • I disabled web scanning and saw no change after a restart of PMS.

  • I restarted my pc with web scanning disabled. No change.

  • I disabled every active scanner. No change after a restart of PMS.

Each time I see this type of error for the missing agents.

Mar 31, 2016 08:11:00:914 [3812] ERROR - Timeout or error reading status line from plug-in pipe [com.plexapp.agents.movieposterdb], we’re killing it.

Where is plex looking that it can’t read? Since it isn’t a proper url, I can’t get avast to exclude it.

Any further suggestions? I’m about ready to nuke this PC and start from scratch but as you probably know, that is my last option because it’s about a year old and that is a serious PITA to reinstall all of the programs.