WebGUI Hangs upon start of jail in "TheBrig"

[Techfreek87]

I am attempting to create a jail for Plex Media Server and have been successful in other attempts/scenarios. I originally created a full install of Nas4Free as a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation 9 and created my Plex jail for a test run (everything successful) before implementing the same product into my ESXi 5.1 server. I then migrated the completed product to my ESXi server and attempted to start my Plex jail only to have my webGUI hang upon start. I am running in promiscuous mode as instructed by a previous forum, but no change. Anyone have any similar issues? I am still somewhat new to Nas4Free, so take it easy on me! Also, if whomever replies to my post has a resolution for the plex media scanner only scanning certain media, that would be great too!

[fsbruva]

This indicates that your jail is having trouble starting. You would be better off starting your jail from the command line to debug it. My guess is that your attempt to start it will cause your terminal to hang (that means it's not TheBrig's fault!)

You probably need to research how to start your plex media server. It might need to be started with a & at the end of the command in the rc script. The & makes the process run in the background. Try this... remove the plex server autostart from your rc.conf file inside the jail. Then, I would wager the jail would start. Then, you need to look into the rc script that starts your plex server. It probably needs to be run as a daemon.

[Techfreek87]

Sorry. I should have been more specific. It is just a basejail without a pkg (plex) install. It is being SET UP for plex. I have unchecked "start on boot" in thebrig to prevent nas4free startup from hanging. Simply put, I can't even get a basic jail to start. I'm leaning more toward the issue pertaining to some basic networking, but just unable to pinpoint it. Maybe I should mention that this is being set up on a LARGE LAN. I work an IT helpdesk and recently received approval from the "big boss" to implement an internal media server shared only by our IT personnel. As I said in my previous post, it was working fine in VMware WKstation 9 (NAS=xxx.xxx.21.138 *DHCP*, Jail=xxx.xxx.21.238) both with the same SNmask. I thought that maybe it was an IP conflict, but checked Active Dir and pinged the jail IP listed above with no negative results. I understand that since you have no way of knowing exactly how our network is set up it could be a number of things, but if you could give me some insight on a few of the more common network-related issues with jails and ESXi, that would be great! It's almost like it's "trapped" inside the server and can't connect out. It's probably going to be something simple and stupid (story of my life! LOL)

[fsbruva]

Ooooofff...

You are heading down the inception rabbit hole. You are running a virtual machine that is trying to run a paravirtualized operating system. Why?

Jails are a way to segregate separate copies of FreeBSD, and have Nas4Free run them all, and be super efficient, because they is only one kernel. Why not just run plex in a stock FreeBSD VM? Or in a Debian VM? Or in a Centos VM?

My initial guess is that your ESX network config is not happy. I haven't used ESX, so perhaps the fact that it worked on Workstation 9 and now doesn't might indicate some of the root cause? The other thing is, while you are SSH'd into the Nas4Free server, attempt to start it with:
/bin/sh -x /etc/rc.d/jail start plex > /tmp/output_from_start.txt

The above command assumes your jail is named plex inside your /etc/rc.conf file. It will dump the screen output to a file located in /tmp that might help. Send the text file to me as a PM and I will see what it tells us.