(not so much)
I had noticed that the frequency of updates to the Intel NUC that powers my Plex Media Server had tailed off (it ran Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) an indication that there was a new version of the long term support OS coming.
Yesterday, it was ready for an upgrade. I took the usual precautions, (really the only “data” is on a giant Seagate external HDD, an 8TB external) and followed the instructions to a ‘T’.
(I suspect you can guess what happened…)
It failed. Oh, it looked like it completed, and logged in via the secondary SSH (port 1022) it all looked good, so I did the final “reboot”. It never came back.
For the record, this is running on a 2 core, 4 thread Intel Core i5 NUC, with 8G ram, and a 400GB internal SDD, running a headless (server) install of Ubuntu.
So, it was time to re-install from scratch. Not a huge deal, but an annoyance.
Alas, I made the cardinal sin, the one that I KNEW could be a problem. I installed the OS with the external drive attached.
Never ever do that. The system happily wiped out the filesystem on that as part of its installation.
Not to mention that I made a boot USB stick of the old version of Ubuntu first (D’oh). And then, in a comedy of errors, I thought that I had grabbed the UUID of my external drive to automount, and then I wiped out my boot partition.
Truly not my finest hour. By a long shot.
- OS installed
- All updates applied
- Re-created an EXT4 filesystem on my seagate external drive
- Automounted the drive
- Setup SSH and added my key(s)
- Installed and configured Samba
- Installed Avahi (this is Bonjour for local connections)
- Installed net-tools so I can get the ports used by Plex
- rsync’d all my media (handily stored on my Drobo) – this took 18 hours
- Installed Plex Media Server (it is a little tricky to do on a headless system)
- set all permissions and ownership on all files in the media drive
- Configured Plex, and set up my media libraries
- Tested it on my computer and my iPad.
All is now back to normal. Not a great day, but at least it was mostly mundane
One thing to note is that Comcast (s’cuse me, Xfinity) is now pretty much all IPv6 even inside my home network. And Ubuntu is pretty seamless on this, so it all “just works” I guess the geeks and all their work to handle the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 is a success. Even the plex server main access is a v6 address. Cool.
Now to get back to viewing video!
