Plex won't enter my home directory or other partitions

Plex is run under plex username, so you may encounter the following permission issues:

  • Ubuntu restricts access to /media/$USER through ACL (that's the "+" when you ls -l /media). Solution below.
  • Your drives may not be mounted to allow plex user to read it. Check it with ls -l on the drive or folder that cause issue, to see the group owner, group permissions and user permissions. Solution below.
  • Your folder may not allow plex user or group to read it. Use sudo chmod -R u+r FOLDER to allow all users. Or add flex user to the folder group (see below) and use sudo chmod -R g+r FOLDER.

Fix permissions to allow Plex to access /media/$USER

Check which group you and plex belong to:

groups
groups plex

Now, add plex user to your user group, and allow this group to access /media/$USER:

MYGROUP="$USER"
sudo usermod -a -G $MYGROUP plex
sudo chown $USER:$MYGROUP /media/$USER
sudo chmod 750 /media/$USER
sudo setfacl -m g:$MYGROUP:rwx /media/$USER
sudo service plexmediaserver restart

Fix permissions of NTFS partitions

NTFS partitions must be mounted with appropriate read rights in /etc/fstab:

Check your user and group id (1000 and 1000 in example):

id

Edit /etc/fstab to mount the drive with read permissions for your user group and for all users (cf. umask, which is 777 less the desired "chmod" number):

UUID="XXXXXX" /media/USERNAME/MOUNTPOINT ntfs rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,default_permissions,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=002 0 0

Fix permissions of mdadm RAID disks

If you're using mdadm, this may be needed in /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf:

CREATE mode=0775

You've got two options I think. You can run plex media server as your user, or you can add yourself and plex to a group and give that group access to your home folder. I run Plex Media Server on OS X for the time being, so I haven't run into this problem myself, but the fix should be fairly trivial. This link explains how to add users to groups in linux, that's the way I think I'll be going when I switch my Plex server to Ubuntu.

Tags:

Permissions

Mediaserver

Plex

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