FreeNAS 11, borked permissions

[SteelWolf]

I just did a clean install of FreeNAS 11 and I'm trying to set up my plugin jails again. I'm finding to my dismay that everything described in this thread is now wrong.

It seems that there is now a built-in "media" user and "media" group, both with the id 8765309. That's cute, but it breaks my previous permissions setup. I'm also having difficulty figuring out which plugins are actually running as that user and which aren't. How can I see what user a plugin is running under?

Thank you in advance for any help.

 

[SteelWolf]

Update:
Transmission is still running under user ID 921 as before. I created a user with this ID in the FreeNAS GUI and set it to own the folders Transmission will need to work in. Back in business there, no write permission errors.

SickRage uses the new "media" user. I've now set "media" as owner of all the folders it will need to see.

So far so good, but my ideal situation is for group writing permissions to work so I can set any users I find to a common group that is able to write to certain folders.

 

[Allan Wilmath]

I would use ps from inside the jail. You could also use ps -a from outside the jail I think. These will tell you the owner of the processes that are running. Using an ls -hal will tell you who owns which files and directories. You can use chmod and chown to alter permissions and owners.

I don't know what your setup is but I have been using the official Plex Docker container for almost a year and it blows away the Plex jail and plug in reliability and updatability. The first Docker container would be a big job to setup, but it is definitely a superior way to run open source software.

 

[SteelWolf]

Is Docker still a viable setup on FreeNAS 11? I thought that was removed when they ditched Corral.

 

[Allan Wilmath]

They did, which why I'm still using Corral personally. I've built a second Plex Docker container using Ubuntu 16.04 so I can move from Corral, which will require a complete reinstall of FreeNAS. The reliability and upgradeability has been so good that it was well worth the effort.

You could run Ubuntu using bhyve on FreeNAS 11 so that a samba share in Ubuntu can mount your media files. This turned out to be easier than dealing with Rancher. The actual Docker part is easy, it is the mounting of the file share that was the most wors to figure out.

I run FreeNAS virtualized on server hardware so I just added a VM running Ubuntu to keep it separate from FreeNAS so that they could be managed independently and be easier to rebuild and update them separately.

It has been great being able to restart a Docker container and it updates on it's own to the latest version. Not a version someone volunteers their time to compile and manage, but a Docker image directly from the developer. Complete with all of it's dependancies. It is also nice to have the library meta data outside of Plex so that you don't have to deal with that if you need to reinstall. Even the Plex config is stored outside of the container.

It can be more work initially, but has saved me a lot of work over the last year. It does require you to work out all the details and share points ahead of time before actually installing the Plex server.

 

[SteelWolf]

Thank you for the response and details. I don't think setting up Docker is really the best solution to my own needs right now as I had everything working properly before, prior to this change of user and group identifiers in FreeNAS itself. As cute as it is to have "8675309" I wish they had updated the plugins to match because it's rather frustrating trying to work out how I had sorted this years ago.

 

[usergiven]

The actual Docker part is easy, it is the mounting of the file share that was the most wors to figure out.

I run FreeNAS virtualized on server hardware so I just added a VM running Ubuntu to keep it separate from FreeNAS so that they could be managed independently and be easier to rebuild and update them separately.

I'm thinking of the same separation myself but had a couple of questions. Do you share the media files through NFS or CIFS? Where do you keep your plex config directory, on your pool or inside the separate VM?