LightSpeedTaco

Hello everyone, Seems we can’t catch a break. Basically what happened was the maintenance performed last night went very well and quickly however a recent change interfered with the restoration of the Plex Media Server databases. To avoid data loss such as play progress we moved the database and removed the old one. When Plex re-analyzed the media it pointed to where the codecs were on another version of Plex Media Server and when it couldn’t find them and went to download the correct ones it would fail as these codecs were no longer available for download. See the following link to Plex.tv here. So it seems that once you go past a certain point in versions you can’t really retrieve the necessary codecs and our last backed up versions of these codecs are incompatible with our current Plex version. What does this mean for you? The load balancing script we use is currently not compatible with the newer versions of Plex Media Server so we’ll be running everything off the main server rather than all three for the time being. I’m not concerned that it won’t be able to handle things but it will be doing a lot alone… Read More »Changes to Plex Media Server – Mandatory Updates

Hey everyone, It’s been a crazy ride so far but it appears that the issues plaguing the NAS have vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. Personally I don’t believe that this is the last time we will be dealing with this issue as it was never really discovered what had caused it in the first place therefore nothing was done to remedy it. Then again, maybe something we did worked after all despite our exhaustive log analysis trying to find out anything we could about the issue. For now, I’ll end this section of the post off with an optimistic thumbs up on extended use of the server again. Last but not least, some exciting news to make up for the NAS issues/downtime lately. Imagine that you wanted to watch a horror movie on Plex but not by yourself…kind of. Now up and running is PlexTogether! A third party community project that lets you synchronize your playback sessions and chat in real time as you watch media on Plex! Now there is a lot to getting it going on my end and on the user end so I’m currently accepting beta applications via the contact me page. Just include your… Read More »Is it over? | New Project BETA

Hey everyone, So we are still determining the root cause of the failure(s). Either way if they are software based or hardware based we have action plans in place. Firstly, please note that there will be an extended outage during some critical testing to ascertain if the issue is software based or not by removing all disks from the NAS that are currently mounted and disconnecting the expansion chassis SAS cable and re-initializing the NAS on a fresh 3TB disk with nothing but the QNAP OS installed. Then we wait for stability or a failure. Now this is where it gets tricky since the waiting game will mean the content needed to power the media server won’t be accessible until we see a failure or an extended period of stability. On the other hand if the issue is hardware related which would make sense given the behavior observed (random power up and down cycles with unclean shutdowns). If this is found to be the case then we have already established contact with a very helpful hardware technician who has been assisting us in troubleshooting and would be involved in the potentially eventual RMA of the entire system (drives excluded of… Read More »State of the NAS – Where We Stand

Hello everyone, It appears that the NAS has become sentient and has a mind of it own. It’s being rather rotten right now though! It will randomly power off and on making stable service basically impossible. Here are the details which are also on the status page. A previously intermittent issue with the NAS has gone hard and randomly powers off and on the NAS typically not through an entire boot and is therefore making the Plex Media Server unusable. The server will be down intermittently very frequently so please keep this in mind until further instruction. I am currently in the process of collecting the appropriate logs for QNAP support and have a contact who can consult and assist in the event of a hardware issue. I’ll try to keep you updated as frequently as I can based on when updates arise. At this point there is no apparent culprit with the exception of some suspicious segmentation faults without timestamps which point to a potential soft issue. Any questions can be forwarded to the team via the contact us page however as stated above I will do my best to keep everyone in the loop. Team LightSpeed  

Hello everyone, I’m proud to introduce to you the newest member of the LightSpeed Team, our Media Administrator, jattrockz! His goals will include optimizing the media libraries and making your browsing experience a breeze. He’s proven to be knowledgeable and brings some great skills and ideas to the table. Please welcome him with open arms. Regards, The LightSpeed Team