FreeNAS+Plex

[Adcadet]

Anybody running Plex on FreeNAS? I'm struggling to use Plex to host family pictures. I'd love to create a ZFS data set for my albums but I can't seem to get through the process of linking the shared folder with the jail that Plex lives in.

 

[Mercutio]

I found that it was easier to just host files on FreeNAS and run my server on a Windows PC.

 

[Adcadet]

Figured it out. I had to first use the command line to get into the jail and create the directory. Feels like that should have been automagic, and indeed, from looking online, it looks like in some cases that is.

Why, Merc? Administration is basically all with the web interface. I feel safer with Plex (available to the internet) running in a FreeBSD jail. And what else am I going to use the 2600k for that's in my FreeNAS box?

 

[Mercutio]

My FreeNAS machine was RAM limited for much of its life. Even though it had 8 cores to work with, I felt there was a subjective decrease in performance for using Plex on it. I switched the server over to a Windows box and I stopped noticing when anything was streaming, probably because the Windows machine was generally underutilized.

My current Plex machine is a Windows Server with 24 cores and 48GB RAM. To the best of my knowledge, I've had as many as 13 non-local clients using it at one time while continuing my normal level of internet activity. I don't even notice when it's being used.

 

[Adcadet]

Was the FreeNAS machine using ZFS? I think I shared earlier a little about how performance increased significantly when I went to a more beefier machine that included lots more RAM - I think you might have been the one to point this out.

 

[Mercutio]

I gave up on my FreeNAS machine about 18 months ago because of the expense and annoyance at tracking down compatible 4GB+ ECC FBDIMMs for my system. I saw a big performance gain moving from 4GB up to IIRC 12GB. I could see that I would've been happier still if I could've gotten 16GB or more, but when I built my new file server, it was far too much hardware to leave in as an appliance machine.

Right now I'm using Windows Storage Spaces in combination with SnapRAID snapshots on my big storage box, which also runs Plex and has several Hyper-V guests running on it. ZFS is great and I wish I still had that feature set, but I got better file server performance out of Windows than anything else I tried.

 

[sechs]

Figured it out. I had to first use the command line to get into the jail and create the directory. Feels like that should have been automagic, and indeed, from looking online, it looks like in some cases that is.

I run Plex on my FreeNAS server. The Plex server port to BSD seems to be a bit of a hack and definitely is not official. The FreeNAS plugin is, of course, a bit of hackery on top of that.

Just make sure that you keep your files in datasets outside of the jail.