hi all!  i'm having a problem and am not sure exactly what to do about it!

 

i have a great unraid setup with a plex server installed.  most everything is working fine.  i use a program called MCM (Media Center Master) to identify and download metadata stored within each movie folder.  again this all works fine!

 

Recently, I changed my MCM organization to rename movie files and folders... my collection is quite large, and without proper renaming, it becomes difficult to find what i want!  MCM can do this cool rename in a specified format, and renames the movie file, the folder, the related metadata.  again i turned this on only recently

 

i have been using plex on my unraid system and things have been running well BUT i now see that whenever a movie file is renamed by MCM, plex shows that the movie file is 'unavailable' and that i should check file permissions.

 

I think what might be happening is that plex is set to update once a day, and when i download a movie, plex adds it to the collection, however afterwards, MCM comes along and renames the files and folders.  then, i get an error whenever i try to play the renamed file, and the error says 'file unavailable, check file permissions.  Perhaps MCM is changing file permissions when it renames the file?

 

any suggestions on how to resolve this? i love how MCM fetches the metadata, and i love the rename, however whenever a movie gets renamed, plex can't 'use' it anymore!

 

i'm not really sure if its a plex, MCM, or permissions problem?!?!

 

any advice is appreciated!!!

 

I don't use Plex (until I upgrade my unRAID CPU) or MCM but it sounds like you're on the right track. Have you tried checking the permissions before and after MCM modifies the files? Compare that to permissions of files that Plex can access?

 

I don't use Plex (until I upgrade my unRAID CPU) or MCM but it sounds like you're on the right track. Have you tried checking the permissions before and after MCM modifies the files? Compare that to permissions of files that Plex can access?

 

i haven't tried that as i'm not too linux savvy.  can you recommend how i can do that?

 

Or it might just be that Plex has the files in its database under the old file and folder names. Have you tried rescanning/cleaning/whatever Plex does to refresh its database?

 

If you want to check permissions as I suggested earlier, your user shares are at /mnt/user/sharename and your array disks are at /mnt/disk#

 

From console or telnet session go to a folder where a file is located

cd folder-path

and

ls -al

Try putting it in single or double quotes. For example

 

cd 'X2 (2003)'

 

or

 

cd "X2 (2003)"

 

both worked for me.

 

 

oops thanks.  deleted my post as i figured it out JUST before you posted!  sorry to waste your time (and for venting!)

 

so for a movie which works the permissions are

 

-rw-rw---- 1 nobody users 2348560594 2008-01-19 20:57 Aladdin\ (1992).mkv

 

and a movie which doesn't work has:

 

-rw----rwx 1 nobody users 11742455054 2011-01-20 09:18 28\ Days\ Later...\ (2002).mkv*

 

any thoughts on these permissions?

 

I guess you could just run newperms on the files to get them fixed but that still doesn't explain how they got that way or keep it from happening again. Can you take a file that works now and make it not work by modifying it with MCM?

 

thanks, i'm running that now.  i have a LOT of files, so i definitely hope having to constantly run this isn't the fix!

 

i will let fix permissions finish, then try the non working files, and see if they work.  if they do, i'll take a currently working file, and then rename it with mcm.  then i'll see if it works, and i'll also check before and after permissions

 

i guess it seems like i might be confirming my initial suspicion- that mcm is changing permissions... if so, i wonder how to resolve that?

 

You can also run newperms from the command line on just a single folder rather than having to do the whole server if you want, like

 

newperms /mnt/user/Video/Movies/*

so i ran the fix permissions job overnight, and the non-working movies 28 days later, now works fine.  also from using your commands i can see the permissions in the post above, now look like the formerly working movie, aladdin

 

so i guess this shows that the permissions were changed, and have now been corrected

 

my problem is that i guess everytime i run MCM, i'll have to fix permissions?

 

If you do need to do it again you can just run newperms on the files that need fixed instead of the whole system.

 

Are the files initially created on unRAID and then MCM is editing them from Windows?

 

What version of unRAID are you on? I know there was an update to SMB on one of the more recent rc releases. Since SMB is how Windows sees the files there might be something there worth looking at.

If you do need to do it again you can just run newperms on the files that need fixed instead of the whole system.

 

Are the files initially created on unRAID and then MCM is editing them from Windows?

 

What version of unRAID are you on? I know there was an update to SMB on one of the more recent rc releases. Since SMB is how Windows sees the files there might be something there worth looking at.

 

hi there thanks for this info.  running the permissions on a certain folder would be a lot quicker but i'd also have to somehow track which files were ran through mcm, which ones were altered etc. 

 

yes the files are being created on unraid ie sab is running on unraid and extracting to my movie collection.  and yes mcm is running on windows, and is reading my library on unraid. 

 

i think what i'll have to resort to is turning off the rename function of mcm and have it strictly fetch metadata.  might make for a messier collection of movies but at least they should all be watchable!!

My movie downloads are originally created on unRAID (nzbget), but then I manually rename the folders from Win7 before I scan them into XBMC. I don't use plex yet because my CPU is a little weak for transcoding.

 

Since we are both creating them on unRAID and renaming them on Windows it's not clear what the difference is. Maybe it's MCM but hard to imagine it is doing anything other than calling on Windows to rename the file.

 

I think you said you are on unRAID 5 but I don't recall if you mentioned the specific version. I am on rc11.

 

The release notes specifically mention a samba (SMB) upgrade after rc8a. I know there were several people on the forum upgrading samba themselves for permission issues before it was included in an official unRAID release.

Oops sorry I overlooked you asking about version. In pretty sure I'm in 5.12b  but I'll confirm when at home

 

edit:  yep 5.12b

Note sure what is happening here but I have the same setup running PMS on my Unraid server and I also use Media Center Master for fetching Metadata.  I haven't seen this issue and I have MCM rename my movies and movie folders automatically as well so it shouldn't be changing any permissions.

 

The difference is that my Plex doesn't update until later in the night after I have already grabbed and organized my Metadata.  The only issue I had with MCM and Unraid was caused by the setting “inspect and record video file details” which I had to uncheck otherwise the program would lock up.  I'm also running the latest version of Unraid.

Oops sorry I overlooked you asking about version. In pretty sure I'm in 5.12b  but I'll confirm when at home

 

edit:  yep 5.12b

You might try upgrading to the latest version (currently rc11) and see if the SMB update fixes this for you. If you do upgrade you will have to run newperms again once but if it fixes it then maybe you won't have to keep running it.