SOLVED: Admin GUI error loading screens in 10.11.10

[nuke]

I updated my Jellyfin server 10.11.8 to 10.11.10 last week.  Since then the status has never updated.  The update happened 4 days ago.

In v10.11.8 all the screens worked.  I'm not sure what has happened in the update process but the server has been running for 4 days and most of the admin screens are still showing errors or no data.  During the 10.10.7 to 10.11.8 update that I did a month or so ago, the update to the databases took 12-24 hrs and all the admin pages showed data.

From the various GUI pages in the Admin area I'm seeing: "Failed to load settings page", "An error occurred while loading display configuration data.", "Failed to load metadata settings", "Activity - No Records to Show", "Plugins: An error occurred while loading plugins." etc. etc.

Interestingly enough, the clients can attach and play media without any issues.  It appears to only be the admin portion of the web interface that isn't or won't update.

My Jellyfin server is running in a Debian 12 LXC container on Proxmox.  The media files are stored on Truenas 25.10 (separate hardware) and are accessed via SMB.  The set-up had sufficient CPU, RAM, network etc. to run 10.11.8.

As I'm a new to Jellyfin, I'm struggling to figure out what has gone wrong and how to fix it.  Any suggestions and guidance are appreciated!

Thank you.

[EliteAlien]

Is this just errors in the browser? If so have you cleared the browsers cache and reloaded the page?

What are the error messages? Do you have any logs you could provide?

Since this is in Debian can you access the container through Proxmox via the console for the container or SSH into it and then run some commands. If this is not a cache related issue then can you check the following folders permissions. /usr/share/jellyfin/web & /var/lib/jellyfin Then for good measures I guess also check /var/lib/jellyfin/metadata & /var/cache/jellyfin. If you don't know how to do this, simply type in the terminal or console "sudo ls -la path" replacing path with one of the suggested locations. I wouldn't imagine it would change permissions from upgrading from 10.11.8 to 10.11.10, but stranger things happen, as I had 10.11.8 to 10.11.9 completely wipe out my libraries and other stuff.

Do you have a backup of your LXC container? If not I would highly suggest to start backing up before each update. Otherwise if you do, you might want to use a backup and update 10.11.8 to 10.11.11 since it's the latest and not 11.10. You could just fix the problem the easy way with this method.

[TheDreadPirate]

How is Jellyfin installed? A container within the LXC or as deb packages via our auto-install script? If the latter, did you upgrade all 3 packages? Or did you mistakenly only upgrade the server package without also upgrading the web and ffmpeg packages?

[nuke]

Thanks @EliteAlien and @TheDreadPirate for the help so far. I will answer some questions right away and then will work on the others tomorrow.

I have cleared the browser cache multiple times and restarted Firefox.

I will have to search for the log files using the terminal as the GUI log also has an errors.

Is there detailed documentation somewhere that I've missed that describes what the permissions should be? Can you share where I find it?

I have a snapshot of the original 10.11.8 and back to 10.10.7. I ran the update including all the Jellyfin libraries after I did the update of Debian to make sure everything was up to date. I don't want to roll back the snapshot yet because I want to understand and learn. If I understand what went wrong, I may be able to share.

Jellyfin was originally installed 10.10.x using the Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts. Since then I've updated using apt update & apt upgrade. The web and ffmpeg applications were also included in the script and subsequent updates.

[EliteAlien]

I will have to search for the log files using the terminal as the GUI log also has an errors.

/var/log/jellyfin is the location for log files. Though since you were getting an error via the web interface of Jellyfin, I figured there might be a error it's stating.

Is there detailed documentation somewhere that I've missed that describes what the permissions should be?  Can you share where I find it?

The Jellyfin folders should be "jellyfin" for the group and user. So "sudo chown -R jellyfin:jellyfin path" & "sudo chmod 775 path" to one of the locations previously mentioned if when you "sudo ls -la path" and both the user and group isn't "jellyfin". This likely didn't get changed, but then again stranger things have happened. I remember also having a similar thing happen with 10.10.7 to 10.10.0 where the databases got changed permissions. (10.11.X has been a bit rocky for me, and it seems others as well.)

Though without any real information from your end both TheDreadPirate & myself are sort of guessing what it might be.

Jellyfin was originally installed 10.10.x using the Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts.  Since then I've updated using apt update & apt upgrade.  The web and ffmpeg applications were also included in the script and subsequent updates.

I figured this was the case when you stated LXC container. Though if you want to sort of double check, maybe do a "sudo apt install --reinstall jellyfin jellyfin-web jellyfin-server jellyfin-ffmpeg7". This will force it to reinstall again over the previous. If there was an issue during the install that wasn't displayed with an error or something.

[nuke]

Thanks for the detailed response @EliteAlien. I did an apt update and found a couple of Debian updates and it also indicated that there was a 10.11.11 update set. So I did that update and low and behold everything in the web GUI is working properly and showing all the info.

I'm going to take some time and scan through the logs and check the other items you mentioned. It will help build the memories for the next time I have an issue.

Any way, thanks for everyone's help. I will report back if I find something in the logs or find an incorrect permission.

[nuke]

Hi again.

Apologies for the long delay in responding.  Today I finally had some time.  I have to tell you that despite the issues that I found with the permissions, we've been using Jellyfin on our home network without incident so I really didn't have the urgency to do anything.

I did a snapshot of the LXC container before beginning.

I found that the permissions were all screwed up.  Thanks for your suggestions.  For others and myself (I'll forget this in a year and then forget how I solved it ...   )

Here are the permissions:

Code:

/usr/share/jellyfin/web
# ls -la /usr/share/jellyfin/
drwxr-xr-x  6 root root 2264 Jun 10 14:10 web

/var/lib/jellyfin
# ls -la /var/lib/
...
drwxr-x---  9 jellyfin adm    10 May  9 12:40 jellyfin
...

/var/lib/jellyfin/metadata
# ls -la /var/lib/jellyfin/
total 45
drwxr-x---  9 jellyfin adm      10 May  9 12:40  .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root    root    21 May 18 14:34  ..
drwxr-xr-x  3 jellyfin jellyfin  3 Dec  5  2024  .aspnet
drwxr-xr-x  3 jellyfin jellyfin  3 Dec  5  2024  .cache
drwxr-xr-x 10 jellyfin jellyfin 19 Jul  8 19:18  data
-rw-r--r--  1 jellyfin jellyfin  0 May  9 12:40  .jellyfin-data
drwxr-xr-x  8 jellyfin jellyfin  8 May 11 05:13  metadata
drwxr-xr-x 15 jellyfin jellyfin 16 Jul  5 08:27  plugins
drwxr-xr-x  3 jellyfin jellyfin  4 May  9 12:40  root
drwxr-xr-x  3 jellyfin jellyfin  3 Dec  5  2024 'Subtitle Edit'

/var/cache/jellyfin
# ls -la /var/cache/
...
drwxr-x---  7 jellyfin adm  8 Jul  7 08:30 jellyfin
...

ls -la /var/lib/
...
drwxr-x---  9 jellyfin adm    10 May  9 12:40 jellyfin
...

So given that there were numerous issues, I decided to take the suggestion from @EliteAlien and do the reinstall.
I ran the "apt install --reinstall jellyfin jellyfin-web jellyfin-server jellyfin-ffmpeg7" since I was logged in as root.

When I logged back in, and checked the admin section, everything showed up including Plugins and all the info about caches, number of movies, songs etc. etc.  

Thanks both of you for your help!