On my mid-2017 AVA Direct running Linux Mint 19.2 64 bit "Tina" GNU/Linux, my media libraries exist under /media/wellywu/WDBlack6TB. I use this Western Digital Black 6TB 7200 RPM hard disk drive to store my media content for both JRiver Media Center 25.0.113 64 bit Master License and Plex Media Server 1.17.x 64 bit. I followed this guide to get Plex Media Server to access my media folders. It's a long read, but I think that this is a file ownership and permissions issue:
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
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edited Oct 15 '16 at 10:09
answered Mar 15 '15 at 13:27
KrisWebDev
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My media folders where owner/group my username (which for some reason was stopping the thumbnails from being generated)... Once I ran usermod -a -G username plex and then sudo service plexmediaserver restart and did a "Force Refresh" the thumbnails all downloaded correctly
Probably not the correct fix but it works. – Tod Thomson Aug 7 '15 at 11:15
Thank you SOO MUCH. I have struggled with this so much and this is finally what worked. – chase Jan 4 '16 at 6:54
I think adding one of the flags in /etc/fstab did it for me, spent lots of time on other solutions but this one did it for me, thanks. – alistaircol Dec 26 '17 at 22:11
I know it's a lot to dump in this thread and it's not directly related to JRiver, but this is what I had to do to get Plex Media Server to access my media content. My WD Black 6TB is formatted EXT4 not Microsoft Windows NTFS so I never created the /etc/fstab rule at boot up.