I personally believe this to be a Plex issue and not an Unraid issue however my post over at Plex has not gotten much of anything.

 

I've done quit a bit of troubleshooting, and can normally nail problems such as this on my own.

 

I have faith in the Unraid forums!!!  Anyone with a theory, I would welcome some input here.  At this point I have a work around so I'm really at the point were I refuse to let this one defeat me out of pride and intellectual curiosity.

 

See my posts below

 

https://forums.plex.tv/index.php/topic/157404-recently-upgraded-plex-now-local-server-and-libraries-show-offline/

What version of unRAID are you currently running? If your using version6, are you using the plex plugin, docker or VM?

Try switching browsers. Chrome on my laptop says that my plex server is offline. Firefox and IE on the same laptop connects just fine.

I was on 5.0.6, when I went back to a known working backup, it put me on 5.0.5.

 

Far as browsers go, all of my plex clients , and I have about 7 in the house, all can not see my unraid instance anymore.  I don't believe it to be a browser problem.

So, after going to a known working backup of my flashdrive and still coming away empty handed, that started pointing me rather hard at my cache drive files as the only data that could possibly be different from a known working setup.

 

I pointed Plex to a different location, naturally all my settings are lost, but Plex Tower instance came online via the Web Interface!!!

 

I will have to rebuild all my libraries.  I took a look at the Plex log that is also in the cache drive and didn't find anything.  I would love to know what it choked on in the Plex cache data files to prevent it from starting 100%.  If anyone knows what log would be needed, I could post it.

 

  I wonder If I can run a weekly cron job to copy these files and create a backup location I can switch to.  Rebuilding the libraries does indeed take time.

I want to do something similar for my flash drive as I am all about automating my system maintenance. 

 

    The positive side out of all this, I built an Ubuntu VM on my ESXi host and did a hypervisor NFS mount between the two to access my media while Plex was down.  I think I'll leave them both running for redundancy for now on.    I get calls at home when my server is down......  lol

 

 

See this post regarding backing up the Plex appdata directory.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=38905.0

 

I get calls at home when my server is down......  lol

And probably a comment or two about how Netflix doesn't go down nearly as much...

  You know, I have 5 monitoring and corrective action scripts to keep plex up and had some excellent uptime's until now.  None of which did anything for this particular situation.  I was shooting for the elusive 99.XXXX uptime.

 

I have an NFS mount on DD-WRT to store a script that pings OpenDNS, and refreshes DHCP after 3 failures, then reboots the router if it still fails.

 

A script that heath checks my ESXi host, does a clean shutdown of all VM's if possible, then kills all VM's and reboots on critical health check failures.  My VM's auto start in the correct order and correct pauses between them on boot up.

 

I have my plex telnet test script that cycles plex if it fails to take connections, which I shared on the forums.

 

I have a script that makes sure all critical VM's are powered on and starts them if not.

 

Then lastly a healthcheck script in Unraid, that will reboot on critical failures after bringing the array down if possible.  The array stop funtion doesn't work right, I don't think that's scriptable for Unraid.  The kind of failure that causes a reboot would probably mean any attempts to access the GUI would hang anyway.  vmstat run queues need to sustain over 50 for that one to trigger.

I was just going to run a "cp" command however rsync I am not as familiar with. 

 

I'm looking over the Man page now, the below --delete option cleans the destination directory out in preparing for the copy and not the source I assume?

 

/usr/bin/rsync -avrtH --delete

 

I'll set that up assuming that's the case and test it.

It deletes files in the destination directory that no longer exist in the source directory. it keeps the destination a mirror image of the source. If the delete option were not included, files in the source Plex library that were deleted by Plex would not be deleted in the destination on next script run.

The other benefit to using rsync is it will only copy new or updated files on subsequent runs (as opposed to copying the entire Plex library on every run), so it's much faster.

I see, that's much better.

below script appears to be working, thanks again for the rsync recommendation.

 

#!/bin/bash

# Date:  04/12/2015

#  This is a weekly plex cycle and cache backup, Monday @ 4am

# Add this to your Cron Jobs

# 0 4 * * 1 /boot/PlexWeeklyCycle

/etc/rc.d/rc.plexmediaserver* stop

sleep 5

/usr/bin/rsync -avrtH --delete /mnt/cache/.plex1 /mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup  >> /var/PlexBackup

sleep 45

/etc/rc.d/rc.plexmediaserver* start

sleep 5

telnet -c localhost 32400 </dev/null 2>&1 | grep -q Escape

if [ $? = 0 ]

then

echo "$(date) Plex was restarted for weekly reboot and appears to be taking connections"  >> /var/PlexCheckLog

echo "$(date) Plex was restarted for weekly reboot and appears to be taking connections"  >> /var/PlexBackup

else

echo "$(date) Weekly Plex restart did not work, Plex did not come up clean" >> /var/PlexCheckLog

echo "$(date) Weekly Plex restart did not work, Plex did not come up clean" >> /var/PlexBackup

fi

Or close to it

 

Granted my first run should take the longest and have the most job output but should I be concerned much with all the errors that showed up in the log?  My data made it to that backup just fine far as I can tell, perhaps just remove a switch so my logs don't get spammed

 

7be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_a42eef0780f45f4685d462a5453109659cf909d7": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_aa27acb3117fa40fa5689b7e57b64b1a1f143b87": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_d3a887ddcdffa0787ada2f45161e0a35a6b76ab2": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_dacf9da03b9c093e8d23308431c96d29e28d49a9": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_dbbbdfe95506f557c27d743e8c83837d540790a0": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_dd7d796afc344219be8a606bf9d9f25846a15e17": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_e0bc9753705f38e7d6924e57fafa222affee1a36": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_e8bc4222ed3c6eba773d03bdecfdc3fb860031a1": No such file or directory (2)

rsync: failed to set times on "/mnt/user/Backups/PlexCacheBackup/.plex1/library/Application Support/Plex Media Server/Metadata/Movies/7/b67ecd9ff91592f73307be0fb442eb6c16652cb.bundle/Contents/_combined/posters/com.plexapp.agents.themoviedb_e9bb12783c793b0a22c9177700c9750553f9368d": No such file or directory (2)

 

Those errors are because you are backing up to a user share and not a disk share. Not exactly sure why it happens, and it's specific to backing up a Plex library, but point the backup to a disk share instead and the errors will go away. It's discussed further down in the thread.

Ahh, for something like this there shouldn't be much need for going to the user share, i'll point to a disk.

 

Thanks again and sorry for not reading further in the thread.

No worries. I've personally never experienced the error myself as I've always backed up to a disk share as I wanted the backup confined to a single disk. Others had the issue you experienced as they were backing up to user shares.