Andrew Ostrom
Explorer
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2017
- Messages
- 57
I don't have a strong Unix background, and I've had my FreeNAS running for about a month, so I'm unsure about how to best configure lots of things. What I'm struggling with now is how to best set up the file system to do what I need it to do for my Plex(pass) server. So, I'm looking for advice on how to make this work - I'll recount what I've tried and why it's not really what I want.
I have a variety of datasets on my FreeNAS, and want to create a Plex library that combines directories from multiple datasets. As a somewhat simplified example, let's say that I have three datasets:
Each one of these has dozens or hundreds of sub-folders and hundreds to thousands of files in each folder. My requirement is to have a Plex library that contains the contents of a few of these sub-folders. For this example I'll say I want to have the following directories combined into a Plex library:
I have created mount points in my Plex Jail for all three datasets, "a", "b", "c". Adding each of the directories to a plex library works fine; I then have all the files I want to be able to see available inside the library. Unfortunately, what happens is that all the folders are effectively combined into one superfolder, and I can't browse the contents by folder inside the Plex player. I can't add the dataset root directories to Plex, that would be orders of magnitude the number of files and many, many more TB of data. I know I can create collections, but then every time the contents changed I'd have to manually add the new files to the collection; it seems like a maintenance nightmare.
Is there a way to use Unix symlinks (or some other mechanism) to make this work? I have created another dataset, let's call it "/mnt/pool1/plex". If I use "cp" to copy the directories I want into the new dataset everything works great. BUT - of course I am now consuming lots of extra pool space, and I have the need to sync the directories on an ongoing basis. It seems to me that there should be some mechanism to have the "plex" dataset populated with directories that are links to the "real" data in the other datasets. After many hours of searching this site, and Google, and reading a lot of man pages and other material I think I'm just more confused than when I began. I'm sure this is a lot easier than I'm finding it, it's just my lack of Unix experience that's making it hard to figure out. A few experiments I've made with symlinks have been abject failures.
I have a variety of datasets on my FreeNAS, and want to create a Plex library that combines directories from multiple datasets. As a somewhat simplified example, let's say that I have three datasets:
Code:
/mnt/pool1/a /mnt/pool1/b /mnt/pool1/c
Each one of these has dozens or hundreds of sub-folders and hundreds to thousands of files in each folder. My requirement is to have a Plex library that contains the contents of a few of these sub-folders. For this example I'll say I want to have the following directories combined into a Plex library:
Code:
/mnt/pool1/a/foo /mnt/pool1/a/bar /mnt/pool1/b/fubar /mnt/pool1/c/afu
I have created mount points in my Plex Jail for all three datasets, "a", "b", "c". Adding each of the directories to a plex library works fine; I then have all the files I want to be able to see available inside the library. Unfortunately, what happens is that all the folders are effectively combined into one superfolder, and I can't browse the contents by folder inside the Plex player. I can't add the dataset root directories to Plex, that would be orders of magnitude the number of files and many, many more TB of data. I know I can create collections, but then every time the contents changed I'd have to manually add the new files to the collection; it seems like a maintenance nightmare.
Is there a way to use Unix symlinks (or some other mechanism) to make this work? I have created another dataset, let's call it "/mnt/pool1/plex". If I use "cp" to copy the directories I want into the new dataset everything works great. BUT - of course I am now consuming lots of extra pool space, and I have the need to sync the directories on an ongoing basis. It seems to me that there should be some mechanism to have the "plex" dataset populated with directories that are links to the "real" data in the other datasets. After many hours of searching this site, and Google, and reading a lot of man pages and other material I think I'm just more confused than when I began. I'm sure this is a lot easier than I'm finding it, it's just my lack of Unix experience that's making it hard to figure out. A few experiments I've made with symlinks have been abject failures.