Plugin vs not. Retire old plexservers on legacy

[nikinp]

Dear all,
My first post. Thank you all for being such a passionate community - please be welcoming ;)

I setup my Freenas 5 years ago under 9.X (main use is Plex) and upgraded at the weekend (with the usual twists and turns). I am a novice where even the GUI is complex for me to understand.

Given my last of knowledge, I would like to adopt the path of least friction to keeping up to date with Plex on Freenas with minimal config / update requirements. That being said, I do want to be able to make the most of Plex Pass (e.g. Camera photo upload) but also the Plex feature that allows you to delete files in the main media share via the Plex console.

So first, given the above, should my path be plugin based, if so, what is the best tutorial for this.
If not, then should I use the guide here https://www.ixsystems.com/community...to-install-plex-in-a-freenas-11-2-jail.19412/

Second, under 9.X server, I had somehow setup two Plexmedia servers 5 years ago, which should now become redundant. What is the steps to decommision these safely?

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

To the last question, it should be easy enough to just stop the jail and remove the "offline" server from the Plex.TV dashboard. So long as your media is stored outside of the jail, that's really all you need to do before destroying it.

As for having updated, FreeNAS 11.2 now has semi-automated jails installation (called Plugins), of which Plex is one of them. Simply navigating to the plugins section and clicking the Install button for the Plex plugin will get you up and running with a base install.

From there, stop the plugin, go to its entry in the Jails tab, add in your mount points (preferably in the same locations as previous).

If you want to try migrating your configuration, you'll need to copy the Plex Media Server folder from the old jail to the new one; for ease in doing this I believe the plugin's location for that is in the root instead of buried in the libs folder like it normally is.

If all goes well, when you start up the plugin it will automatically load up the config and associate to your Plex.TV dashboard and everything will be hunky-dory.

Either way, you'll want to do that before going to 11.2 update 6 (I think) because Warden jails are gone in later versions.

 

[nikinp]

I'm on 11.2.U7 Freenas. I wasnt sure if your were indicating that Plugin based approach is not suggested for that version onwards?

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

No, I was suggesting that if you had Plex in a jail in FreeNAS 9, you'll need to switch up regardless because "Warden"jails are replaced with "IOCage" jails and would stop working if you didn't migrate them.

If you don't mind your configuration being reset (which includes things like watched status for your videos) then using the Plugin is the most frictionless way to go.

 

[nikinp]

Thank you. Plug in worked.
in terms of your first point about ‘So long as your media is stored outside of the jail’. How do I check this is the case?I should be good to go once I know that part.
thanka again

 

[Tsaukpaetra]

What I mean is, things like the movies and pictures aren't inside the jail itself. You get them there with "mount points" in Jails -> (your jail) -> Mount Points.

Otherwise if you destroy the jail you lose your movies etc.