Hi all.
I wanted to know if anyone else has run into this or knows what I am doing wrong.
I currently run Plex and have a file share mounted where my content is stored. When trying to delete content in Plex, it says, “There was a problem deleting file.” I am assuming this is a permissions issue, so I granted root the ability to delete the content. I have tested this in the terminal, and it works. The reason I granted root access is because it says the Plex container is running as root.
What am I doing wrong? Any help would be much appreciated.
This is very likely a permissions mismatch between the Plex container and the folder where your media is stored.
Even if the container shows it’s running as root, containers often still use an internal user (for Plex it’s usually a plex user ID). If that user doesn’t “own” the media folder on ZimaOS, Plex can read files but won’t be able to delete them.
Instead of granting root more access, the better approach is to make sure:
- The media folder on ZimaOS is owned by the same user/group ID that Plex runs as
- Or Plex is configured to match the existing ownership of that folder
This mismatch is very common with mounted folders under /DATA in ZimaOS.
Many people fix this by:
- Aligning the container’s user with the folder’s user
- Or adjusting folder ownership once, properly
A quick (but less secure) workaround is opening up the folder permissions, but the clean fix is aligning ownership.
Nothing is actually “broken”, it’s just a rights mismatch.
I ended up removing the mapping from the file app as I couldn’t change the permissions. I had to mount it via the terminal and allow anyone to write to the directory and file:
sudo mount -t cifs -o “username=,password=,sec=ntlmssp,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777,noperm” // /media/
I changed the PLEX_UID in the for the Plex service to the user I wanted to use, but it didn’t work, so I removed that from the environment variables.