TLDR version: I messed up the permissions on my only volume. Is there any way to fix it without deleting and recreating the volume?
My system's running FreeNAS 11.2, having upgraded in-place from 11.1. A few days/weeks ago I was notified that there was an update to 11.2.U4: I left it for a few days, then installed it yesterday. Today I noticed that two of my plugins weren't working (Nextcloud and Resilio, both installed pre-11.2). Here's where I got stupid.
I frequently find that my Windows PCs are restricted to read-only access when I try to delete or rename files in my various datasets (media, backups, Windows file history, etc.). The solution has always been to recursively reset the permissions from the root of the dataset (I've never managed to work out the root cause, but this usually fixes things for a few weeks). For some reason, I thought my new problem was caused by something similar, so I tried doing the same thing with the jails for the plugins. This did nothing, so (here's the dumb part) I did the same thing at the volume level. This didn't help either, so I figured I'd just delete the jails and recreate them using the new FreeNAS interface. This failed, with an error message about the permissions (775 at this point) being too lax. I therefore tried to change the permissions for the jails to something more restrictive (I think I tried 755, 770 and maybe 750).
A little googling has revealed that I've almost certainly screwed everything up by forcing those permission changes. I therefore apologise to anyone reading this for wasting their time with my stupidity and ask humbly for advice on fixing it.
I immediately gave up on Nextcloud and Resilio, as my use of both of them is pretty simple and, once I'm able to get plugins running again, won't take long to set up again. Plex is more of a problem, but since I'd already followed some tips here and separated the Plex server data from the server installation (data's held in a separate dataset outside of the jails set), I figure I've got a reasonable chance of getting that running again without losing too much data. I assume that my media/backups/etc. datasets won't really care that much about file permissions (I should note that this is a home server, I'm the only user, and it's not accessible from outside of my home LAN) so hopefully I can just leave them in whatever state they're in now.
I deleted the existing Plex application jail and tried to reinstall it the way I'd installed it before, in a manual jail rather than as a plugin. I assumed that this would set permissions to whatever the default values are in a new jail, which would hopefully fix the problem. However, after creating the jail, I opened a shell in it and was presented with nothing: none of the usual messages, no prompt, no flashing cursor. I tried to install the plugin version instead and that failed, again saying permissions were too lax.
I then found this thread and tried the suggestion in the second post. This didn't seem to make a difference (and based on other threads, I suspect that any fix would probably have been temporary and error-prone anyway). I then tried the suggestion in the fourth post, which seemed better, in that the plugin actually installed, but now I can't get Plex to run.
I've never knowingly used iocage for anything, but I understand that it's what's used for plugins these days. Can I delete its dataset and get FreeNAS to recreate it? Will that fix the permissions for that new iocage/jails datasets/subdirectories?
Assuming that I can get Plex installed (either plugin or manual jail) and running, I'm hoping that I can reuse my existing plexdata dataset so that I don't lose my database and planned recordings. If I get Plex running as a new installation, then copy over the pertinent files from the old dataset, will they keep whatever (probably wrong) permissions they have, or inherit the permissions of the dataset/directory they're written to?
Worst case scenario: I assume I could just delete the volume and all of its contents and create them from scratch - am I right? I've got enough spare hard drives that I could start copying the data off of the volume, but it'd take a lot of drive swapping and time (there's about 4TB of data I'd need to rescue), so any solution that keeps my main datasets intact would be preferable.
Thanks in advance.
My system's running FreeNAS 11.2, having upgraded in-place from 11.1. A few days/weeks ago I was notified that there was an update to 11.2.U4: I left it for a few days, then installed it yesterday. Today I noticed that two of my plugins weren't working (Nextcloud and Resilio, both installed pre-11.2). Here's where I got stupid.
I frequently find that my Windows PCs are restricted to read-only access when I try to delete or rename files in my various datasets (media, backups, Windows file history, etc.). The solution has always been to recursively reset the permissions from the root of the dataset (I've never managed to work out the root cause, but this usually fixes things for a few weeks). For some reason, I thought my new problem was caused by something similar, so I tried doing the same thing with the jails for the plugins. This did nothing, so (here's the dumb part) I did the same thing at the volume level. This didn't help either, so I figured I'd just delete the jails and recreate them using the new FreeNAS interface. This failed, with an error message about the permissions (775 at this point) being too lax. I therefore tried to change the permissions for the jails to something more restrictive (I think I tried 755, 770 and maybe 750).
A little googling has revealed that I've almost certainly screwed everything up by forcing those permission changes. I therefore apologise to anyone reading this for wasting their time with my stupidity and ask humbly for advice on fixing it.
I immediately gave up on Nextcloud and Resilio, as my use of both of them is pretty simple and, once I'm able to get plugins running again, won't take long to set up again. Plex is more of a problem, but since I'd already followed some tips here and separated the Plex server data from the server installation (data's held in a separate dataset outside of the jails set), I figure I've got a reasonable chance of getting that running again without losing too much data. I assume that my media/backups/etc. datasets won't really care that much about file permissions (I should note that this is a home server, I'm the only user, and it's not accessible from outside of my home LAN) so hopefully I can just leave them in whatever state they're in now.
I deleted the existing Plex application jail and tried to reinstall it the way I'd installed it before, in a manual jail rather than as a plugin. I assumed that this would set permissions to whatever the default values are in a new jail, which would hopefully fix the problem. However, after creating the jail, I opened a shell in it and was presented with nothing: none of the usual messages, no prompt, no flashing cursor. I tried to install the plugin version instead and that failed, again saying permissions were too lax.
I then found this thread and tried the suggestion in the second post. This didn't seem to make a difference (and based on other threads, I suspect that any fix would probably have been temporary and error-prone anyway). I then tried the suggestion in the fourth post, which seemed better, in that the plugin actually installed, but now I can't get Plex to run.
I've never knowingly used iocage for anything, but I understand that it's what's used for plugins these days. Can I delete its dataset and get FreeNAS to recreate it? Will that fix the permissions for that new iocage/jails datasets/subdirectories?
Assuming that I can get Plex installed (either plugin or manual jail) and running, I'm hoping that I can reuse my existing plexdata dataset so that I don't lose my database and planned recordings. If I get Plex running as a new installation, then copy over the pertinent files from the old dataset, will they keep whatever (probably wrong) permissions they have, or inherit the permissions of the dataset/directory they're written to?
Worst case scenario: I assume I could just delete the volume and all of its contents and create them from scratch - am I right? I've got enough spare hard drives that I could start copying the data off of the volume, but it'd take a lot of drive swapping and time (there's about 4TB of data I'd need to rescue), so any solution that keeps my main datasets intact would be preferable.
Thanks in advance.