Plex Media Server

2 days ago

benshollis

3 minutes

Plex media is going to host all media files I own. This is going to run in its own virtual machine on proxmox.

To connect

user@192.168.1.252

Inside of Proxmox I have created a virtual drive to store media files on.
pve>plex>hardware>add>hard disk

This gave me a 2TB drive to store media files onto but it needs to be mounted to the ubuntu server and given a path. To do this automatically I added an entry to fstab. The steps to do this are as follows

First list the block devices that the system can detect

$ lsblk
NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda      8:0    0   100G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0   512M  0 part /boot
└─sda2   8:2    0  99.5G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0   1.8T  0 disk
└─sdb1   8:17   0   1.8T  0 part /mnt/plex

Here we can see that sdb is the 2TB drive that was created. Now format this drive and give it a ext4 file system. This will wipe all data, do not accidentally do this to the wrong device.

$ sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb

Now we need to get the UUID of the drive to make this drive mount automatically on startup

$ sudo blkid /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: UUID="8986dc87-308b-44ab-a1e3-b78fc98c871e" TYPE="ext4"

Linux needs to know where on the file system the data from this drive should be mounted to. Making a new directory inside the /mnt folder for this is the best way.

sudo mkdir /mnt/plex-media

Now we are ready to edit fstab and have this drive mounted to the /mnt/plex-media folder

$ sudo nano /etc/fstab

APPEND TO BOTTOM

UUID=8986dc87-308b-44ab-a1e3-b78fc98c871e /mnt/plex ext4 defaults 0 2

Fstab has been changed and now it needs to be reloaded to take effect

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reexec
$ sudo systemctl --user daemon-reload
$ sudo mount -a

Plex requires that the plex user is the owner of the drive. However I want to be sure that my regular user account and plex both have read write permission to this drive. To do this I made a group and added both users to it.

$ sudo groupadd media
$ sudo usermod -aG media plex
$ sudo usermod -aG media ben

Set group ownership of the drive

$ sudo chown -R root:media /mnt/media

Give permissions to owners, groups, and other users

sudo chmod -R 775 /mnt/media

Save and test

$ sudo mount -a

I want to be able to directly connect my laptop to this drive so that I can write data to it as if it were a drive mounted directly to my laptop. To achieve that I used sshfs which uses a secure ssh connection to mount the drive to my laptop using the ben account that now has read write permission to the drive.

Install SSHFS

$ sudo pacman -Sy sshfs

Create a local mount point

mkdir -p ~/plex-media

Mount the remote drive

sshfs ben@192.168.1.252:/mnt/media ~/plex-media

Accessing Plex

Plex web client is hosted from within my home network on
http://192.168.1.252:32400

To mount the drive to my laptop I created a shell script that will run the sshfs command so I don’t have to keep it memorised

$ touch plexlogin.sh
$ nano plexlogin.sh

#! /bin/bash
sshfs ben@192.168.1.252:/mnt/media ~/plex-media

$ chmod +x plexlogin.sh

Then created an alias so that it could be run from any location in the terminal with mountplex command

$ sudo nano /.bashrc

APPEND 

# connect to the plex server files
alias mountplex='/path/to/file/plexlogin.sh'