I messed up my Plex server today. It wasn’t connecting to any of my libraries, and in a moment of frustration I removed the Plex server from within the Plex server UI hoping it would let me add it back again. It didn’t.
Eventually I figured the issue was with DNS on the Synology server where it was running. So I fixed that, but now I was stuck with a library-less Plex server. There was no way as far as I could see to add the server back. Of course, I tried uninstalling & reinstalling but that didn’t help. I also deleted the PlexMediaServer shared volume after uninstalling, but that didn’t help either. Even if I do a fresh install and don’t claim anything, I am automatically signed in with my Plex account and unable to add the server back.
The solution seemed to be to run the setup wizard that is run upon first login, but there was no way to launch that as far as I can tell. This forum post gave the idea that going to http://127.0.0.1:32400/web should do the trick, so I figured let’s try and do port forwarding to the Synology.
On my laptop I ran the following:
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ssh -N -L localhost:32400:127.0.0.1:32400 synology.server.fqdn |
Then I tried browsing to the URL but it failed. In the SSH prompt I was getting the following errors:
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channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed channel 2: open failed: administratively prohibited: open failed |
Weird.
Googling on that made me realize it is because port forwarding is disabled by default. So I SSH’d into the Synology, ran sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config and changed AllowTcpForwarding no to AllowTcpForwarding yes. Then restart the SSH service:
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sudo synosystemctl restart sshd.service |
Launch the port forwarding tunnel again, try http://127.0.0.1:32400/web and yes! finally I was in. And it did launch the wizard and I was able to configure all my libraries again from scratch.
What a waste of time. All because I had a single DNS server entry on the Synology and that server service stopped responding. Other devices weren’t affected as they had two entries and the second one was working. At least I learnt some Synology stuff in the process. :)