sirkblog

How to upgrade Plex on the Drobo 5n

posted: Jun 29, 2017 categories: technical_tips tags: plex, drobo

This is one of those things that is probably documented very well somewhere but I couldn’t find it so I’m writing up how to do it. I don’t take credit (or responsibility) for any of the programs mentioned here; I’m just a grateful user. This process has worked a few times in a row for me - most recently with version 1.7.5.4035 - so I feel comfortable recommending it.

  1. Make sure that sudo and OpenSSH (or Dropbear) are installed from Droboports. - You’ll need to ssh into your drobo and su to root later and these programs let you do that.
  2. Download the update - Go to Plex. Click the Download button. Use the dropdown menu to select drobo from under the NAS category. Then hit the Download button.
  3. Upload the update to the Drobo - I use scp but you could also drag and drop.
  4. Check the starting version - more /tmp/DroboApps/plex/version.txt
  5. Unzip plex in a home directory - You’ll want to create a directory and unzip in there. mkdir plex; cd plex; tar zxvf ../plex.tgz
  6. Su to root - /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps/sudo/bin/sudo su -
  7. Change to the Apps directory - cd /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps/
  8. Stop server - plex/service stop
  9. Copy plex to install location - cp -r */path/to*/plex .
  10. Ignore the update script - If you run the update script you’ll need to repeat the copy step.
  11. Check the service status - plex/service status If it says that the service is running then you may have to kill -9 the PID which is listed under /tmp/DroboApps/plex/pid.txt or just grab it from running ps -ef grep plex.
  12. Start the server - Once it’s no longer running, plex/service start.
  13. Check the service status - plex/service status
  14. Check the version - more /tmp/DroboApps/plex/version.txt If it’s running the version that you downloaded then you made a mistake somewhere. Check the home directory where you unzipped the tar file that the files were created more recently than the ones in /mnt/DroboFS/Shares/DroboApps/plex. If they are you can try to copy them again; perhaps your first attempt to copy didn’t work.

Now that I’ve got that working I need to go try to get Crashplan working again.