Plex jail metadata / video playing problem in 11.2 Beta3

[steven6282]

Hello all,
I recently set up a new FreeNAS server and put version 11.2 Beta3 on it. I set up a Plex jail through the plugins install and am having a problem with getting it to download metadata.

I saw this thread:
https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/plex-no-metadata-11-2beta3-iocage-jail.69907/

Which sounded like the same problem, however the solution stated there is not the problem I'm having. On that thread it was stated that they had tried to mount a Media folder in the Plex Server directory which caused write permission problems. I have not done this as my mounts are done under /mnt/. The plex user has full ownership and writing permissions to the Media folder that the other user had issues with.

My Plex jail can ping google, so network access seems fine. But it simply will not download any meta data. If I go to a video file and try to manually match it, it is not even able to contact the movie database search in order to do a match.

I looked at the plex logs and the only error message is about failing to determine system local and defaulting to en-US which is perfectly fine.

I also have a problem that the video won't even play. I'm not sure why on this. I again can't find anything in the logs showing errors. It starts up a transcoder process (even though it shouldn't need to transcode the videos I'm testing), and then that process just stops after a while, nothing in the logs as to why that I can find.

I've tried reinstalling the plugin multiple times, same results every time.

I set up a VM and put Plex Media Server on it, and it works fine. Seems like overkill and a waste of resources to run Plex in a VM instead of a simple jail though.

Anyone have any ideas what might be wrong here?

EDIT:
As a side note, although I might have to make a different post for this. Now after messing around with the VMs and such apparently something is screwed up because I can't even install a plex plugin again. It was coming up with an error message about SystemExec start or something like that, I should've screenshotted it but I didn't. Restarted the entire server, now in the middle of trying to install a plex plugin, or when I start / stop the VM it logs me out of the FreeNAS admin page. So the jail doesn't get fully set up or something. When I log back in, it's not started, if I manually start it, it logs me out again. Log back in and it's started, but plex isn't running on it.

 

[phimmerich]

Same issue here (missing metadata, album art, subtitles...) , any progress?

 

[steven6282]

Same issue here (missing metadata, album art, subtitles...) , any progress?

No, I can't even get another jail to successfully configure now. Something seems kind of buggy with jails / vms to me, at least in this version.

 

[bed]

Same issue here. It does not seem to be a permission issue.
I saw this https://forums.plex.tv/t/no-metadata-download-freenas-11-2-iocage-jail/295756 but when I tried this plex did not work at all. Something is amiss with current version.

 

[steven6282]

Same issue here. It does not seem to be a permission issue.
I saw this https://forums.plex.tv/t/no-metadata-download-freenas-11-2-iocage-jail/295756 but when I tried this plex did not work at all. Something is amiss with current version.

Yeah the VNET setting causes it to not work at all. I'm not really sure why. When in the jail with VNET enabled, there is not even a network device available. Only thing in ifconfig is lo0, the loopback device.

I was finally able to get another jail set up, but only if I set a static IP address. If I tell it to use DHCP it seems like it resets the entire network connection causing me to lose connection to the admin panel. (FreeNas is using a static IP as well if that matters).

But even after getting another jail configured, I'm still having the same exact problem. It really seems like as if the user plex that plex runs as, simply cannot contact the internet. Can't su to plex though because it says "This account is currently not available.". No idea what could cause a specific user to not have access to the internet. root can ping google just fine.

 

[steven6282]

Ok, finally found the problem thanks to this thread:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/iocage-plex-metadata-and-transcoding-issue.60628/

The problem apparently is using the same network interface as the one FreeNAS itself is using results in a MAC address conflict. Plex apparently requires it's own unique MAC address to function properly (or it might have to do with my LACP configuration, not 100% sure on that).

The solution is apparently using VNET. Like I said above I was having the problem that enabling VNET rendered the plex server inaccessible and without internet access from the shell. What I did not know, is when you enable VNET, you then have to select vnet0 as the interface for ipv4 as well. Otherwise, it does not create an interface in the jail. Further, you must also make sure to set the default route address (I was doing this before but without setting the interface to vnet0 was pointless), which I just set to my gateway (router) IP as I wasn't sure if that was the same thing or not.

After doing this and restarting the server, I got some weird error about 10.4 is not > 11.2. I went back in and changed the release from 11.2-RELEASE-p2 to 11.2-RELEASE(fetched), then it started but took much longer to start than normal, and seemed to revert back to 11.2-RELEASE-p2. I honestly don't know what the (fetched) version is doing, or really most of this as I'm not familiar much with freebsd nor jails, I'm just poking things that seem to be related lol. My hunch is the (fetched) release forces it to redownload the 11.2-RELEASE.

Anyway, after doing that, I was able to start the jail and eureka metadata downloaded and the videos played appropriately.

Now to see if I can figure out what some of the settings I messed with actually do and make sure the things I changed aren't going to cause problems lol. I now do have the problem again however that if I stop the jail, I also loose connection to the FreeNAS admin *sigh*. I'm guessing it's doing something that causes the network interface to reset.

 

[bed]

Based on what you are doing and on the thread you linked it seems plex is able to process and download metadata. The one thing I had not tried was a reboot of freenas after enabling vnet and selecting allow sockets. So far I have not had any issues with freenas binding to the admin IP (this time anyway).

 

[drinking12many]

uggg thanks I had to rebuild my plex plugin and this fixed it ..... Thank you thank you