Plex IOCAGE won't start mount.fstab: Store: not an absolute pathname

[kranzel]

Hi All,

I have searched around the forums looking for something similar but haven't come across it. Perhaps it is my searching abilities.

I have found similar issues and tried a few fixes, but nothing has worked.

Here is where I am.

I am running FreeNAS 11.1-U1.

I followed this guide. Which was awesome.

Everything was working fine. Then two days ago, my plex server wasn't responding. Went to the shell and tried to start it and got the following error,

Code:

root@servername:/mnt # iocage exec plex service plexmediaserver_plexpass start
plex is not running, starting jail
jail: mount.fstab: Store: not an absolute pathname

I used iocage fstab -e plex to load the fstab file, here is what I got.

Code:

/mnt/ark/Apps/PlexApp   /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/config	  nullfs  rw
0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 15:22:59
/mnt/ark/Media/Movies/RadarrMovies	  /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/mnt/media/Ra
darr	nullfs  ro	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 20:58:38
/mnt/ark/Media/Tv/Tv	/mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexTv		nullfs
ro	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:14
/mnt/ark/Media/Movies/CAM-R6	/mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexCams
nullfs  ro	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:22
/mnt/ark/General/Pictures/Picture Store /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexPi
ctues   nullfs  ro	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:33
/mnt/ark/Media/HomeMovies/Home Movies   /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexHo
meMovies		nullfs  ro	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:
43
/mnt/ark/Media/Logos	/mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/Logos nullfs  ro
0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:52
/mnt/ark/Media/Movies/RadarrMovies	  /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/Radarr
		nullfs  ro	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:59
/mnt/ark/Media/Movies/Movies	/mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexMovies
nullfs  rw	  0	   0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:22:45

Everything looks correct. As the guide above described, I installed my Plex in a dataset. So that mapping seems correct.

I am at a loss as to why it suddenly stopped and won't start again.

Any idea?

 

[JJT211]

Look over the path names very carefully. It took me a while to catch it but I had a similar problem and somehow my paths got changed.

Use the fstab -e command to correct.

 

[ZodiacUHD]

I believe one of the path is not correct. I had the same issue because of that.

 

[kranzel]

Hi All,

Figured it out. Thanks to @JJT211 and @ZodiacUHD it was a path issue.

I started by copying each path from the shell and CD to it. Upon doing this, i found two source path's that did not work. Because they have spaces in their names.

Next i tried using " " around the names, it did not like that. :) Then I tried using \ as the separator and that worked. Below is the exact spinets of the issue.

Root cause was this.

Original Problematic entries (IN BOLD),

/mnt/ark/General/Pictures/Picture Store /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexPi
ctues nullfs ro 0 0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:33
/mnt/ark/Media/HomeMovies/Home Movies /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexHo
meMovies nullfs ro 0 0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:
43

New Corrected entry (IN BOLD)
/mnt/ark/General/Pictures/Picture\ Store /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexPi
ctues nullfs ro 0 0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:33
/mnt/ark/Media/HomeMovies/Home\ Movies /mnt/iocage/jails/plex/root/media/PlexHo
meMovies nullfs ro 0 0 # Added by iocage on 2018-02-04 21:14:
43

Server starts and is good to go. I wonder why it worked in the first place though?

Thanks for the help all. Much appreciated.

 

[Nick2253]

You shouldn't need the trailing backslash unless the folder names end with a space.

 

[wblock]

Worse than that, it escapes the following whitespace and could cause problems.

I'd suggest renaming those directories, getting rid of the space. Otherwise, it will come back to cause problems with rsync and other file copying utilities.

In general, this problem goes away if people remember to never, ever use spaces in file or directory names. Spaces are meant to be delimiters, the "space" between individual items. Use underlines if you must have something there.

 

[kranzel]

@Nick2253 You are correct, I have updated my above post to reflect that change.


Thanks.

 

[kranzel]

In general, this problem goes away if people remember to never, ever use spaces in file or directory names. Spaces are meant to be delimiters, the "space" between individual items. Use underlines if you must have something there.

I have learnt that overtime. However, in this case, these directories have existed long before I started using FreeNAS (They were built under Windows) and I have never cleaned them up. :)

 

[Nick2253]

In general, this problem goes away if people remember to never, ever use spaces in file or directory names. Spaces are meant to be delimiters, the "space" between individual items. Use underlines if you must have something there.

Honestly, I don't find this argument very persuasive (though I see it everywhere). Spaces are first and foremost a grammatical convention used to better communicate language, and they have been overloaded by software as a delimiter. Spaces are also not the only character that software has overloaded for other purposes. And, at the end of the day, it's an extremely Euro-centric viewpoint that doesn't addresses the needs of other cultures and languages for numerous special characters.

For that reason, any software that can't handle a properly quoted or escaped space is not a user problem, it's a software problem. We should be thankful that we can lazily program paths or variables (or whatever) that don't have spaces, but this is the exception now, not the rule. Any and all paths (etc.) should be quoted and/or delimited.

(Just give me second to climb down off my soapbox )

 

[kranzel]

@Nick2253 I don't disagree with you. I took @wblock comments to be specific to the limitations of the OS, not as a personal belief on how things should be in a perfect world.

 

[wblock]

Spaces are first and foremost a grammatical convention used to better communicate language, and they have been overloaded by software as a delimiter.

I'm pretty sure a few thousand years of writing got there before software. :)

any software that can't handle a properly quoted or escaped space is not a user problem, it's a software problem

It's the fact that delimiters need metadata to say that "except this one, this one is not a delimiter but part of the name". Sure, software can handle that. But it bites people, because they know what they meant, but the software is not capable of using context to figure it out correctly. Like in this case.

 

[Nick2253]

I'm pretty sure a few thousand years of writing got there before software. :)

That was exactly my point.

 

[wblock]

Just saying I don't think software added the use of spaces as delimiters... that's what they were already. So now we are stuck. Filesystems have to allow them. But we can avoid using them, and avoid the problems.

 

[Nick2253]

Just saying I don't think software added the use of spaces as delimiters... that's what they were already. So now we are stuck. Filesystems have to allow them. But we can avoid using them, and avoid the problems.

If we want to call them delimeters in their original use, then my point is that they were originally a language delimiter (and ultimately a fundamental part of language), but software overloaded them to be a parameter delimiter.

However, I feel like we're being awfully pedantic on semantics. Fundamental, I feel like we are mostly on the same page here.

 

[Terydan]

So I'm having the issue above where it doesn't seem to like the space in my source path. I have this location currently working with a warden jail no problem, but that was created through the GUI which apparently does all that's necessary to deal with the spaces.
I attempt to add my storage with:

Code:

# iocage fstab -a Plex /mnt/Media/Video\ Server /media nullfs rw 0 0

Then I attempt to start plex with:

Code:

# iocage start Plex

and get:

Code:

* Starting Plex
   + Start FAILED
jail: mount.fstab: Server: not an absolute pathname

When I enter:

Code:

# iocage fstab -l Plex

it shows me the following:

Code:

+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| INDEX |												 FSTAB ENTRY												  |
+=======+==============================================================================================================+
| 0	 | /mnt/Media/Video Server /mnt/iocage/jails/Plex/root/media nullfs rw 0 0 |
+-------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

it seems like the system is thinking "Server" after the escaped space is the start of the destination path.

How do I make this work? AFAIK changing the name of the source is not a very easy so making this work seems like the way to go. If there is a sufficiently easy way to rename my source zvol then I can take a stab at it.

 

[pro lamer]

escaped

In the first command: Try escaping the escape too, like:
\\\ Server

Sent from my mobile phone

 

[Terydan]

Got it working finally. I don't know if the solution by Pro lamer above would have worked as I was already knuckles deep in trying to rename my directories to prevent future issues. I kept trying to use

Code:

zfs rename "Media/Video Server" Media/Video_Server

but I kept getting device busy. Eventually I just stopped all my jails, VMs, and removed all SMB shares and it let me rename the directory. I reset all my shares and was able to successfully add the directory to my iocage jail. Thanks for the assistance.