Plex Media Not Found / Content Hanging Issue

When running a Plex Media Server you occasionally find that some issues do creep up on you without any warning. For example in this particular case I had users reporting that they were unable to play content via my server. They reported that they either got the error “Media not found” or that the content simply hanged and did nothing.

Investigation:

After some investigation I found that the directory that holds all of my mounted network drives was unresponsive. A simple list directory contents command hanged for over 10 minutes before returning with a result.

$ ls

_

After looking for some reason why this was happening I found that this issue conincided after having a power cut which have become more frequent in my area.

The Fix:

As the mounted network drives have not rebuilt themselves very well after a bad shutdown you will need to unmount and then reload the mounted locations. To unmount the drive(s) the command is:

sudo umount /exampledirectory /anotherdirectory

To then remount these you will need to reload the fstab configuration file which can be located here /etc/fstab (which is where you would have initially created these mounts).

To reload the file, the command is:

sudo mount -a

The above will not require a reboot and will fix this particular type of issue instantly.