A Fresh Start | No More Errors…For Real This Time | Updated Requests System

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to make a post here but I figured you all deserved and explanation for the recent plague of downtime and playback issues.

For a very long time the main server has run Ubuntu 16.04 and it’s been great to me however the other two servers were purchased and setup at a later date and for whatever reason I assumed going up a step to 17.04 wouldn’t be an issue, which was true for a while, until 17.10 came along and turned everything on it’s head.

Plex Media Server as a clean install on 17.10 was a disaster in itself. Library version information errors, breaking critical aspects of the system like SSH, SSL and cURL.

For days on end I dove through logs that ended up needing to be so verbose to diagnose the issues it took hours upon hours to finally find the root causes, yes multiple. It was a trainwreck.

Some clients that didn’t work prior worked flawlessly, the usual web player was a total write off and the load balancer was freaking out trying to make heads or tails of each failed session.

I took a look at it from every angle…network, disk integrity, permissions, you name it, and the mystery of all these various issues only became more baffling.

By the end of it all I had seen so much of the systems and how complex and crowded things had gotten in the filesystem that I went for a clean slate. Now all three of the servers are on the same page and only run what is requiried to operate our usual day to day functions. Perhaps one day I’ll buy a test server to play around with new features and idea for enhancements but until that day let’s keep it simple.

So apologies for all the downtime and playback errors, I’m confident that we have eliminated all the potential variables for failure for this current setup but it is a very fragile one and will need constant care.

Lastly, the link for the requests page has changed and is updated on the home page so please update your bookmarks. We are now running Ombi v3 which has some drawbacks but is still a work in progress and I feel it will be beneficial to hope on that train early as they have different dependencies and switching would be troublesome in the future.

There is currently no limit on requests however non-donor users will need to have their requests approved to enable us to have some control over how rapidly we consume what little disk space we have remaining.

Questions, concerns and queries can be routed to the team via the contact page or via teamlightspeed@dev.lightspeedta.co by email.

Welcome back everyone!

LightSpeedTaco and Team LightSpeed