Emby requires a VNET Jail

[SKull77 3]

Hi folks,

I've been using emby on FreeBSD for a couple of months now.
Of course I'm running it in a jail. I've always had the problem that emby could not make any https connections.
Weirdly enough, emby did run despite the errors. But as you can imagine, a lot of features like 'automatic metadata download' or 'plug-ins' did not work at all.

Since I've already paid for a 'Premiere Subscription', I've contacted emby support.
Although the support had great reply times and was very friendly, they could not help me.

But I found the solution myself: Despite mlock.allow mentioned on Emby's FreeBSD Download page, Emby requires a VNET Jail with its own network stack!

It seems that a lot of people in the FreeBSD section of this forum, use FreeBSD derivatives like TrueNAS and whatnot.
I assume those appliances unnecessarily create VNET jails by default.

In case anyone runs plain FreeBSD and encounters the same problem that I encountered, I've typed up a little how to on the setup.

It can be found here on github.com

I've also attached it as a PDF to this post.

And of course, I'm open for suggestions and corrections.

Emby VNET Jail Setup.pdf

[Duffyx 25]

To my knowledge this seems incorrect that Emby requires a VNET jail.

[SKull77 3]

3 hours ago, Duffyx said:

To my knowledge this seems incorrect that Emby requires a VNET jail.

Do you have a standard jail running and your embyserver.txt is not full of Exceptions?

As a matter if fact, emby-server expects 0.0.0.0 connections to work at its startup. That alone can't be done in a standard jail.

Edited December 11, 2023 by SKull77
Addendum

[Duffyx 25]

Hmmmm not a whole lot, only mb3admin. Could you share an embyserver.txt?
My set-up is working just fine with a normal jail.

"Emby-server expects 0.0.0.0 connections to work at its startup. That alone can't be done in a standard jail." => Why exactly do you think this?
Maybe its better to go over your error messages and debug together.

Edited December 11, 2023 by Duffyx

[SKull77 3]

16 hours ago, Duffyx said:

"Emby-server expects 0.0.0.0 connections to work at its startup. That alone can't be done in a standard jail." => Why exactly do you think this?

Because standard jails neither have 127.0.0.1 nor 0.0.0.0

Also, mb3admin is the main API for emby.

Here's a simple test: can you list the available plugins? Not the installed ones, the ones you could install additionally.

 

Addendum: 0.0.0.0 means all interfaces and depends on the Interpretation of the application. It might work in a standard jail.

Edited December 12, 2023 by SKull77
Addendum

[Duffyx 25]

Here's a simple test: can you list the available plugins? Not the installed ones, the ones you could install additionally.

I can and they show up all just fine. Which FreeBSD version are you using on the host and in the jail?

[SKull77 3]

4 hours ago, Duffyx said:

Here's a simple test: can you list the available plugins? Not the installed ones, the ones you could install additionally.

I can and they show up all just fine. Which FreeBSD version are you using on the host and in the jail?

both are 13.2-RELEASE-p6

Emby Server Version: 4.8.0.61