Media Storage for Plex LXC (Incompetent Noob Needs Help)

[Computers Are Black Magic]

Preface: This is embarrassingly simple (take note of my username). My relevant experience is limited to configuring and installing klipper on my Voron and installing and Home Assistant OS on an old Dell Latitude E5440, the same machine I'm dealing with now. It has an i5-4200U and 4GB of DDR3L, just to give you an idea of how pathetic this setup is.

On that laptop, I have successfully installed Proxmox 8.2.2 with a VM of Home Assistant OS and a Plex LXC (unprivileged) courtesy of the tteck script. The HAOS is running great, but this is the first time I've dealt with either Proxmox or Plex and I'm having trouble figuring out how to get my downloaded media available to the Plex LXC. I actually also have a VM running OMV from my attempts to get something working, but I feel like that shouldn't be necessary?

I have an HDD in an external enclosure with my movies attached via a USB 3.0 port on the laptop. I thought I was on the right track by doing a device passthrough to my Plex LXC. I passed through /dev/sdb, /dev/sdb1 (the partition), and /dev/bus/usb/003/002 (all three because I was desperate for something to work). Of those, all were visible but only the latter was available to add as a library on the Plex interface, but Plex said it was empty.

Thus far I've avoided NFS, SMB, SSH, other black magic stuff, etc. because that's a whole other world that I'm ignorant to, but maybe you'll all tell me that it's going to be a necessary evil. Also note that I have no desire or need (or hardware overhead) for RAID, ZFS, or any other data integrity considerations, because I could lose it all and be fine grabbing another hdd and loading it with the movies.

I feel like this should be as simple as a dozen button clicks on the GUI given how simple this is, but IDK at this point.

I seem to have bitten off more than I can chew, but I'd appreciate some assistance if anyone can spare the time. Thanks in advance.

 

[kellen]

Welcome! If I understand correctly, you have a setup like so:
PVE host (Dell Latitude)
HAOS as a VM on PVE
Plex as a container on PVE
OMV as a VM on PVE
USB HD attached to the Dell.

You would like the USB HD to be passed through to the Plex container to be used for media storage. It already has a filesystem with media on it.

Sound good so far?

I think you need to do two things to get the media visible to Plex.
1) Pass through /dev/sdb (or appropriate drive) to the LXC. I recommend figuring out which device in /dev/disk/by-uuid/ on the PVE machine is the USB HD and passing that through. The sdX names can change if you add/remove drives (like more USB drives).
2) In the Plex container, mount the filesystem on /dev/sdb (or /dev/sdb1 if that exists) to a location you create, like /plex_media. I think this was the step that was missing when you tried passing /dev/sdb in. The device is passed through, but you still have to mount it.

If that works, you can make the mount permanent by adding it to /etc/fstab in the Plex container. You can use the "man fstab" command to learn more about the /etc/fstab file and how to add entries to it.

Otherwise, you can try mounting the drive in PVE (and adding it to /etc/fstab on the PVE machine) and passing the *directory* that you mounted to through to the Plex LXC.

Hopefully this helps!
Kellen

 

[Computers Are Black Magic]

@kellen Thank you for helping me!

Yes, that is my setup. After reading your recommendations, I spent some time fiddling with it but still have some confusion.

1)Linux and CLI are still quite new to me, but I used the node console and the ls and cd commands to find dev/disk/by-label/Media, which I then passed through in the "resources" tab of the Plex LXC. I also passed through /dev/sdb1 which I got from the "disks" tab of the node.

I went to the Plex web interface and attempted to add a library, but when browsing for the media folder and navigating through either of the two passthrough paths the final "click", either Media or sdb1, are grayed out and not clickable.

I'm guessing the part that I'm still missing is what you said in "2)", which I unfortunately do not really understand. Even through my (admittedly poor) googlefoo, I don't understand the steps/process of mounting. I could really use and ELI5 of your "2)"

Thank you again