EX2 and PLEX again - PLEX installing but not starting at all

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud EX2
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Hi All,

I wanted to share my findings with others as it may help some people out there with PLEX installation and configuration.

I’ve been using the built in DLNA (twonky?) server for some time now but the only person using it in my household was me due to its sheer simplicity. The rest of my family wanted to see the clunky graphics and all the iTunes-style rubbish to play music. As PLEX has been nicely packaged by WD (or whomever else) to work on the NAS, it was the obvious way to go.

For the last few days I kept trying to install and run PLEX Media Server on my EX2 NAS.

I did a lot of things: installations, removals, different sequences of events, enabling and disabling IPv6, etc. , searched and read many forums – all to no avail.

My WDMyCloudEX2 would not have PLEX working, period.

Being fairly proficient in Linux, I enabled the SSH and started sniffing around the system.

For starters I found out that the service wasn’t working at all – regardless the switch on the dashboard being on. Also, there was no PLEX config or log files present anywhere in the system.

In my search for the installation and configuration folders I spotted a weird thing: on my NAS the usual place for all this, which is /mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog, was not mapped to anything. It existed, but solely as part of the minimal /mnt file system. Hence there was no free inodes to create any files or folders there. On the other hand, a folder /mnt/HD/HD_b2/Nas_Prog existed, and the /dev/md1 raid was mounted to it (actually to HD_b2 level to be correct) with all shares etc. And the OS decided that that was the point to install PLEX into.

I found the installation folder in there and quickly looked into installation and starting scripts. They all referenced in hard, non-configurable way the /mnt/HD/HD_a2/Nas_Prog location. That is why the start process of PLEX kept failing. I modified carefully the start.sh script, flipped the switch on on the dashboard and voila: PLEX configuration page coming ok. Happy days, it all seems to work now.

I’m sure though, that if I do upgrade or reinstallation of PLEX, the problem will come back immediately.

I know that there is plenty of advanced admins out there, who could give me (and others) insight into why my NAS doesn’t use HD_a2 folder but has HD_b2 instead, and also how to avoid problems with updating PLEX and perhaps other software in future.

Regards

1 Like
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Can you give a noob direction? I have very little experience with ssh but can generally navigate around. Did you change the directory in the start.sh script to /mnt/HD/HD_b2/Nas_Prog or is there something else that needs to be done too?

Thanks

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Hi,
Essentially yes. I only changed the location directories in start.sh script. I can’t remember now whether it was only one to two places in this script or something more. I can’t look it up now (can’t login to my home NAS from where I’m now).
My NAS, however, prior to these changes, was (let’s say) “primed” to run PLEX correctly as I was trying all possible solution one could find, to get it working. So, the chances are, one of the other things also helped (such as deactivating IP6, etc.).

I will be upgrading PLEX on this unit anyway in few days, so I’ll post findings.

Kind regards,
RadoVal