FreeNAS 11.2 install Plex server plugin with mountpoint outside its Jail (and group ownership trick)

There are 2 "gotchas" when installing/setting up Plex on FreeNAS...
1) you have to stop it immediately after installing it and set up a mountpoint. This mountpoint is basically the only access to your FreeNAS pool/dataset that Plex has (since it runs in a Jail) and really just consists of what folder in your "real" filesystem you want to use, and where you want that folder located ("mounted") in the Jail's filesystem.
2) Permissions can be hard to understand and many tutorials tell you to just set full access (777/rwxrwxrwx) on your media folder. That works but... yuck. You can just create a group inside Plex's jail with the same GID as whatever group 'owns' your media folder, and make sure it's group-readable (g+rx,---r-x---) in your "real" filesystem.

FreeNAS 11.2 from scratch, part 1: make your USB booter

FreeNAS 11.2 from scratch, part 2: create a user & pool of disks, configure & share its dataset

creating FreeNAS boot-USB with VirtualBox

Installing FreeNAS to (virtual) boot-disk in VirtualBox (for tryout/testing purposes)

adding virtual disks to FreeNAS VM in VirtualBox

starting FreeNAS in VirtualBox and port forwarding so it's accessible

FreeNAS 11.2 first visit via Firefox on localhost and adding first admin user

FreeNAS 11.2 creating RAID-style pool of disks and setting ownership of its default dataset

FreeNAS 11.2 install Plex server plugin with mountpoint outside its Jail (and group ownership trick)

[USAMark]

Solved my problem after hours of troubleshooting!! THANK YOU for taking the time to produce this! I appreciate it!

[MartianMoon]

Dude seriously thank you so much, I have been stressing trying to figure this out for ages. Really appreciate it!

[curtisaccord]

The write-ups were not distinguishing the difference between jail group permissions and freenas permissions. Thanks for the great visualization.

[joostvan]

tnx! great tutorial. Got everything to work on other instructions but the folders were greyed out. Followed your instructions en voila.. very happy

[thirteenonetwentyone]

I have a group created in my plex jail with the same name and GID as the group that owns my media in the freenas server. my mount points are correctly assigned, my plex server is able to select the folder to add to library but the media inside the parent folder does not load up. Do you know why?

[jesusep]

hi bro, I put a new 10tb disk, and I transferred movies for use with plex, I created the mount points but when I want to add the folders to the plex library, the folder where I made the mount points appears as disabled, and it doesn't let me click on it, so I can't access the movie folders, to the other disk if I can access without any problem, as always, the problem is the new disk, I can't get plex to see it and I have it set up just like the old disk, please help

[stefanoferri]

I have 921 instead of 1000, the problem is that transmission jail is group id 921
Will they go into conflict?

[ShiroKage]

I'm trying, but I can't even see the ls -al (on TrueNAS). The user I created to manage the pool has a UID of 1000 already, so does it not create a user when it's already taken?

[haubasstec]

For some reason the Files inside the mountpoint belongend to another group, so i had to do this twice. (and this also works for emby)

[Felix-vehs]

I did it exactly the same and I get:
"drwxrwx- - - +" instead of "drwxr-x- - -+" ...
I guess FreeNAS just really hates me