Yet another Plex plugin wont start post. (with a workaround)

[MrFollies]

Hello,

I've been using freenas since v7 or 8 (cant remember) on HP microserver hardware.
Nowdays my server is mainly a NAS with two jails. Plex and a generic one that I use for things like local DNS etc).

Currently I am running freenas 9.1.1. (Aside: I'm interested in knowing if there is any risk in upgrading to 9.10 and whether or not I should do that in staged i.e. 9.1.1 -> 9.2.? -> 9.3 -> 9.10)

My main problem is in upgrading the plex plugin fro 9.11 to 9.12 or 9.16 the problem I have is that the jail starts but the plugin will not.
Here's my upgrade procedure.

Stop old plex jail (and disable it)
Install new plex into a new plugin container.
copy the plexdata dir to the new container.
Stop the new jail (if running) and give it the IP address of the old jail
Re-mount the media data into the new jail with nullfs.

All of this works fine, but the plugin will not start. (Logs show a HTTP return code of 500 from when the GUI called control.py to start the plugin).

As a workaround I can edit the jail's rc.conf to add plexmediaserver_enable="YES" which means that the plex media server will start when the jail starts...
This works fine and I can probably live with it.

But I would like to diagnose why the gui/control.py does not start the server. Does the fastcgi python webserver (control.py) log it's errors anywhere? Or can I force it to run in the foreground to see what's going on?
Or does this all sound bleedingly famililiar to someone?

Second question... As stated, upgrading freenas from 9.1.1 to 9.10... What's the best path, and is it frought with danger to my precious ZFS storage?

Thanks for the time!

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

this is usually because the FreeNAS webui can't communicate with the plugins control process. adjusting jail networking settings, especially disabling VIMAGE and assigning an actually interface makes this more reliable.

 

[bollar]

Is there anyone knowledgeable on how jails networking settings work with plug-ins? From reading recent messages in this forum, it appears that it's a combination of bugs (such as https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/15817 , https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/15016 & https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/15817 ), plus a lack of understanding of jail networking that's causing the problems.

It's clear that disabling VIMAGE and assigning a NIC to the jail works (VIMAGE gives the jail its own networking stack, but requires DHCP, some knowledge of bridging, etc. to work), but some apps, such as openvpn, require access to the networking stack. For apps that access the internet (e.g. mineos, sabnzbd, etc.), it's important that they have that option.

Simply by setting a unique MAC address and having my DHCP server offer a specific IP address to the jail, I have been able to make some of the plug-ins work with VIMAGE. Others have something else going on that I have not figured out yet.

It would be great to figure out exactly what's going on, so we can have the devs take a look and perhaps resolve in an upcoming release.

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

I dont know exactly what is going on, but I do believe the issues with VIMAGE happen more consistently on systems with multiple network interfaces.

 

[bollar]

Is there anyone knowledgeable on how jails networking settings work with plug-ins? From reading recent messages in this forum, it appears that it's a combination of bugs (such as https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/15817 , https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/15016 & https://bugs.freenas.org/issues/15817 ), plus a lack of understanding of jail networking that's causing the problems.

It appears that FreeNAS-9.10.2 (a476f16) has resolved many DHCP networking issues. I was able to convert all of my jails, including plugins, to DHCP.