 Tommy here from Lauren Systems and Super Micro had sent me the Super Storage 6019p ACR12L plus 1U server and I did a review of it the other day. I also wanted to test it with some software so I loaded TrueNAS on there and I wanted to set up Plex and while I'm setting it up I figured it's a great opportunity for tutorial on how to configure Plex with TrueNAS Core including a very important aspect making sure you have the permissions right not just so Plex can read the media files but so you can set up a share and also add media files and get the permission sorted out. The new ACL system is different than the previous video was I've done on this. I've done a video specifically on the ACL system if you just want to dive into that I'll leave a link to that video because it's on FreeNAS ACLs but the ACLs copied over to TrueNAS in terms of the way they work but I'm gonna show you walk you through step-by-step how to load the Plex plugin how to create the share or set the permissions on a share and how to make a additional user belong to the same share group there were therefore you're easily able to add media files to it. Also I am doing this on a server that has 144 terabytes or available about 96 terabytes even after we put it on to a raid we'll talk about that a little bit first about design of the system which is way overkill for Plex but hey that makes it that much more fun because you know why not have 192 gigs of RAM along with an MVME pool that we're gonna run Plex on and a data storage pool of drives as well to just you know because you got to have a lot of videos and a lot of media they're on there before we get started on that let's first if you like to learn more about me or my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com if you like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top if you like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurentsystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content now once you have free NS all loaded up when you first go to set up a plug-in there's a little gear icon here and you have to choose what pool if you have more than one if you have one pool there's only one option here which pool you want the plugins to live on and I'm gonna choose the MVME pool because hey why not has MVMEs are nice and fast so that seems like a great place to put the actual plugins and the IO cage in a jails and where all pools will live from there we are going to choose either plex media server or plex media server beta the beta is going to be I believe a slightly newer version but does require a plex pass subscription to do that now quick note about these plugins these are ones officially supported by IAC systems they've separated them a few not familiar with the way the plugins work these are community supported so they do have them in case you're wondering where the other ones are that's what that drop-down does and it's just a matter of where the support comes from we're just gonna go ahead and load the basic one assuming you don't have a plex subscription but that really doesn't change things either way with it whichever one you load so we're gonna head and click install and this is our plex flex we'll just give it a silly name and plugin name is plex media server DHCP is fine I don't usually recommend unless you have some special use case for setting up static IP and the reason I bring that up is because usually I let it be DHCP and then I go into my firewall router which hands out the DHCP addresses or in your case whichever one whatever system you have doing that and then I statically assign it that way it makes it easier of generally how we organize most things I let the firewall router or whatever the DHCP server assign all of my devices so they all have addresses that I can easily change and just restart the server and I know where everything is so I'm gonna leave it at DHCP and it's gonna go ahead and create the plugin container download the latest version and we'll just fast forward to this part while it gets set up it goes relatively fast depending on server this server is gonna go really fast alright so we have the plugin installed successfully and it gives us where we can go for the admin portal or when you go here it's gonna refresh real quick you can see it's a little expand and then we can go to manage and they have a demo user setup as Plex at LawrenceSystems.com this is actually something I created just so I could do testing on this video it's not a actual Plex pass one but we can sign in go through the server setup please wait a moment while Plex starts and we're going to skip paying it we'll call it the Plex flex server I'm not worried about it media outside the home that's an up-to-you option we're not gonna add a library now we'll do that after and done now we are set up and no files in here we just have the Plex server up and running and we're signed in so pretty straightforward nothing to do yet and right now we have to stop the server because now we got to get all of our libraries in there now the way a jail works is it is and we'll actually look at the jail itself so there's plugins and jails plugins are automated jails are installed you can also want to have videos on manually creating jails so let's look at the Plex flex one here and we can see we have mount point stop update shell etc. I want to show is where they actually live so if we go to pools we scroll down IO cage we look at the jails and we see here's that jail now technically not the best idea yes you could dump files into the jail natively but the idea of a jail and the reason for them is they're where the files live in terms of the OS so the operating system or the plugins may live in there but you want to keep your data elsewhere that way if you ever had to rebuild or destroy a jail it's not a big deal you can just rebuild or destroy it and your data lives in a different share so we've already created that share right here called Plex flex and we'll walk you through that in a second but just a couple of housekeeping things we need to do first and one of them is talking about how permissions work with ACLs this is the user we have to create user 972 now for every user that you have that runs a service services run as a username Plex runs as user 972 on both free NAS and true NAS this is where the confusion sometimes can come in so what we do is and this is not part of the official system instructions but I think it should be that's why I'm making a video on it you can just create and throw a user 972 at things and have it unnamed there's an easier way and now each plug-in has a different user so if you're using sonar radar transmission you there's ways to look it up and there's comments on there and as you go through the plugins you can figure out what username each one belongs to we're going to go ahead and go over here to accounts users and all I had to do was you add a user now normally when you add a user it starts at a higher number but we started with the Plex user so we just created a user 972 I called it Plex Plex it's already in use that's I'm just showing you how I went through the creation you can create some random password which is probably not a bad idea to create something long in case everyone tried to hack this and guess in because they had local access to your network and want to be that user use a long random password but don't worry you never need it so you only have to remember what it is but that's all I did was create that then this is what that user looks like created so we'll go ahead and edit that users to show you it's Plex username Plex some password that I don't remember I mashed on the keyboard twice at a some long high entry password and then we have the primary group as Plex pretty straightforward now what this allows you to do when you're setting up the ACLs is just type the word Plex instead of user 987 and that's what they said to do here and it does work it will work if you just call it 987 then we also have a user Tom that I created Tom is user 1001 so what we did with Tom is now that we created the Plex user it also created the Plex group ID of 1000 and then the Tom one so if we click on the Plex group ID and we look at the members we made Tom Plex was already a member because it's own group and we made Tom a member of the Plex group these are the important steps to before we get to the ACL part that you've already done this if not if you create the share and go edit ACLs you won't be able to add these because they won't exist yet so once you got this part done then we're going to go over here we're going to go to storage pools now I've already got this one created called Plex flex that we're going to use and we can edit the ACL and pretty much look how it works here so we have a default ACL root and wheel but then we change who acts as control is user Plex ACL type allow permission type basic permission full control and group group users as Plex I mean you could type 987 an error like they mentioned but it looks nice when we type Plex ACL type allow basic permission permissions are full control pretty straightforward and then we would apply them recursively and away we go now just to walk you through real quick what is will create a test one right here so if we add a data set test submit and then we go here edit ACL changes to user EL Plex and allow will just do basic you can get advanced with this but we're just covering the basics here where you can get granular with it we have the group will make this this group and we'll change it to user Plex and remember Tom is a member of this user as well and we don't care about the granular options again so we're just going to say it's an allow rule permissions are advanced full control we do want the inherent flags we don't need this everyone group we're not adding multiple groups as you could there's more options you can dive into on this watch my video on ACLs so inherit so now we've got user Plex ACL allow permission type basic full control that's important with and the same thing here group is Plex allow basic full control file type basic inherit apply recursively in case there's a bunch of sub information you have in there let's make sure you have if you have a lot of data already dumped in a lot of different folders you just apply all of it on there and if you ever screw up there is the strip ACL option to remove all ACLs and start over especially if you've got really crazy ones that you've built up over timing or someone else did one we're fixing things sometimes we start with strip and then start over so we do it right so hit save and that's it that's all you got to do for an ACL and that's how we created these ones here which we'll just look at it again you can see all the basic options please make sure that that inherit one if you're setting it up that's clicked now sharing got to be able to get data into there so how did we do that so we create a window share and it's really straightforward creating a window share we can edit right here we just while I go through a new one real quick but you can edit and see what it was but it's it's under Deadpool Plex flex cool default share parameters there's nothing unless you have some other things that default share parameters are fine and submit it won't let me do it because this one already exists but we could do the test we'll get the test one if we wanted to move it around or however you want so no big deal there pretty straightforward on how to do the share now of course we have to test this year and I've already dumped a bunch of data in there for it to index but let's go ahead and test it now I'm doing this in Linux and if it was windows of you backslash backslash IP address in Linux it's a little different it's SMB colon slash slash 192.168.3.213 that is this is the right there I've already logged in with my username password that I created for Tom new folder some data equal we can do that we have read access let's call it some data added I don't like spaces I like underscores and they open this a new tab let's dump some data in there we know we got permission we'll just I don't know whatever's in here so we'll copy these and paste them all right cool now we have a couple extra video files that I threw in here that we can index for plex of course now we have to get that same data moved over into plex how does that work well it's actually pretty simple so we're gonna go over here jails I'm sorry plugins you can do it actually from either one well but because this is technically a plugin installed from their plugin system we're gonna do it here and we need to stop the plugin now this is the design of jails they don't have permission for anything more than you grant them permission for so the root of a jail actually is that IO cage slash jail slash name of the jail so a jail is a mini system essentially running inside there it's nested within and it only has the permissions given the reason for this is that's a security feature so if something were to happen to plex the only thing plex would be able to access is whatever's in that jail and not access to the greater system so it's kind of you know putting it in this is how containerization works that's essentially what jails are is containers you're containing it to only the tools and things that has access to that also includes file systems so if someone were to manage to do something that varies and get into your plex server what do they have access to well only things you've granted plex access to including whatever data outside of plex you've mounted in so that's why the purpose are for these mount points so we're gonna go here and we're gonna add a mount point so source of the mount point all right dead pool and we have this plex flex great so mount dead pool plex flex destination and that's this nested route here so mount with IO cage lives and the jails live and the plugins all live on the MVME pool so flex route and then where do we want to put it I'm gonna stick it under mount so we put it under mount here and we'll call it plex plex it'll automatically create whatever folder you have or directory however you want to look at it from there so now we see it as this long path because we're at the system level once we're inside plex we see it as mount slash pack plex flex so when I start plex backup it sees its route as in route slash mount so slash being the very beginning directory this is a big difference how these containers slash jails work is they are not able to traverse further up like I said that's a security feature and that's why it's designed this way so all we do is it submit and now we have source is here and destination is there pretty straightforward and we go back over to the plugins and we'll go ahead and start this plugin now because this plugin does have read write access it is possible that from this plugin if you were to delete something it does have permission to delete this is why there's one of the options of exporting these as a read only option so plex could never write to there may or may not have a use case for that I did it read write because I wanted it that way but that is something just of note if you ever wanted to set it up so each plugin can only read data but would never have permission to potentially destroy data now we'll go ahead and go to manage again now that the plug ends up and running all right so once you logged into plex we're going to click on the little plus right here and we want to add a library now movies TV shows music photos those are going to vary by what you're adding we're adding other videos because what I actually dumped in there was a bunch of my own videos I created so they're not technically movies or TV shows you're just my YouTube videos I want to index and we'll call this a plex flex this is the name we have on there we go to next browse for media folders as I mentioned slash is now the root of this so it doesn't see the entire greenhouse system it sees slash mount though and then it sees plex flex hey look there's all that stuff that it that is in there which we go over here there's the some data added and I had this where I created and you can see it's the same list of folders but that's where we want it so mount slash plex flex so we go ahead and here and hit add add the library and away it goes as far as indexing that's it now you're good to go on this in terms of being able to play the movies play stuff back whatever's in here it's going to slowly generate thumbnails for these and hey look there's me reviewing the server that I'm now testing this on with all specifications there's all the drives in there so now we have our entire large massively over built plex server here able to index all these videos what if I wanted to add another library let's just go ahead and walk through the process again so hit stop and actually I have everything in here so while this is stopping over here storage pools and we have the LTS video dump what I did was I dumped my entire main primary freeing ass over to this freeing ass we're gonna head and edit the ACLs on this one here and let's see do we have any of these set for plex no haven't done anything with it yet so it's just a dump of data same thing again so the user flex allow basic full control inherit group flex make sure it's allow basic full control inherit all right apply permissions recursively confirm so I want to make sure everything in there it has the right permissions and yes that's 1.57 terabytes of videos that I dumped in there so there's our LTS video dump and now go over here I want to go to the plug-ins plex flex and we're gonna add another mount point you can have as many mount points as you want so here's the one we already have on this particular jail and we're gonna go ahead and add another so it's mount the dead pool there's that one in a destination we're gonna choose mount again slash LTS video dump seems like a good name for it because it's just all the different videos I have in there submit now I could create a share so I can dump more videos in there but the share permissions are gonna be the same as they were on this one here so if I wanted to create another share to that no problem we're not gonna bother with that though so you have all the videos there I might go back over to the plugins and we'll fire plex back up so start you notice a little checkbox for boot that is of course if you wanted to start every time you restart your true NAS system easy enough to do manage close the expired session we're gonna add another library of other videos again let's call it LTS video dump next browse for folders once again here mount LTS video dump add add library and this may take a little while this is going to certainly push the server a lot harder because 1.5 terabytes these are a lot of videos that are in here so it's it's gonna take a minute to do all the scanning and index all of this and it still is indexing all these I'll read it so pretty straightforward how it all works and then from here you're just using Plex to do whatever now let's say you had some other services that you want to throw in here for example oh I don't know any other plugins or jails that you may want to share with it you can also the same thing as add those users for whatever the other plugin is and we'll reference back over here to these blog permissions radar sonar or transmission these would also you could create a user so you don't have to call them 921 but it will work as calling it 921 and then you could add them to the group and then you can share so the mount point can be in there for another one as well so you don't have to have the mount point restricted to exclusively this but you can add more than one so that way more than one thing can dump data into that data set so you can dump it through the share you can dump it through this methodology here but you know definitely methodology so which you can do this now as a quick demo to show you how that would look I've taken this little test for another project I'm working on and you can look at the mount points for this test and this is unrelated to not really should say not directly related to the Plex one we did but we did the same thing we mounted here we did it to here and then we can go inside of that particular jail go here go to the shell CD slash mount because I put it in the same place as called this one test you can give it a different name because it's inside of a different jail and you can see that it has access to the same files that the other system did so not not a problem being able to do that now last thing I guess we could cover is what's the system actually doing now that it's spent a few minutes indexing everything right so Plex is doing its thing in the background and now let's talk about the server itself and I have a full review that talks about the hardware on the server we're gonna talk about true nas and how we have it set up so this is an Intel Xeon gold 6240 CPU at 2.6 gigahertz and offering 72 threads and somebody commented of why would you need that many for running a free nas or true nas server as it's going to be called now from here forward I keep on to call it free nas but here's the easy answer here's Plex running inside of a jail using up a little bit of processor here and that's because if you have a large media library if you think of the commercial use cases for these this might be a strong use case where you have some tool that does run in a true nas maybe as a jail and indexes all of your media as it's being dumped there maybe by multiple users and this would be the result you know you need something to go ahead and index and organize all that data and keep it going so the pools themselves what how are they configured so we go over here to storage and we go to pools and Deadpool is first the big pool you have right here now I dumped over my video dump which is about 1.5 7 terabytes there and the Plex has got another 33 gigs worth the data this is set up and we'll go here to status a RAID Z tool RAID Z2 pool now this RAID Z2 is 12 drives in it with their all seagate 12 terabyte by 12 so 12 drives at 12 terabyte one big RAID Z2 pool now why did I do it that way not versus you know build six and six so you can get better performance but that would come at the expense of losing space I wanted to make the most space possible and I have an entire you know breakdown video and forum post I'll leave a link to to discuss all the different RAID CFS pool and performance in capacity options that come in there there's a lot to how that works in RAID Z that's why I have a whole you know section of my forums dedicated to the breakdown for all those works and all those options and you may watch it still not come to an easy conclusion but if you're just going hey I just want something fairly resilient but plenty of space this is the way to go now the other pool is the MVME pool and this is where Plex itself in the Jails we told them to live on this particular pool and if we go to status on this we set it up as a really simple RAID Z1 with four NVME drives they're all 3.8 terabyte drives so it gives us plenty of storage in that particular pool for MVME so it's going to be really fast it just not as much storage we have over here but you know there's still enough storage left over on this particular pool that we could have moved it over there but this is you know really overkill if you're going to build a Plexer at home obviously you don't need this much for it but I had this over here for testing so I said hey why not do the demo and why not dive into what it would look like and how fast it would run on here and the volume of videos I have on there like I said it's a it's a decent amount of all the smaller videos which is going to cause it take a little bit longer to do the indexing on there for Plex to build its database but hopefully you found this enlightening you're interesting and now you hopefully have also a better understanding how the permissions and ACLs were so you can set up a Plex server even if it's not as fast or as big as this one but be able to get it going be able to put your media in there and start sharing it and these same concepts apply if you're not using Plex if you're using one of the other plugins you just have to find the username for that plugin and you know adjust this tutorial accordingly alright and thanks and thank you 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