How-to: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS minidlna fixes after upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
This is how I solved the problem with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS minidlna after upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
MiniDLNA is a lightweight DLNA/UPnP media server. The MiniDNLA daemon serves media files (music, pictures, and video) to clients on a network.
My setup before the upgrade was as follows:
- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
- Media files on both the first disk but also spread across various other disks.
The main issue I had was that although the config file at /etc/minidlna.conf was read, it did not process the media files that was on disk other than the first disk. By default the daemon run under the USER minidlna and for some reason this user did not have permission to read the media files on the other disks. I changed the USER variable in the .conf file but it did not take either, not sure why.
How to fix
So I diged a bit deeper and found that the USER is also specified in the /etc/init.d/minidlna executable file. So all I did was changed the USER and GROUP variable to root in the /etc/init.d/minidlna file as indicated below.
CONFIGFILE=/etc/minidlna.conf
LOGFILE=/var/log/minidlna.log
USER=root
GROUP=root
DAEMON_OPTS=""
I restarted the daemon by executing sudo /etc/init.d/minidlna force-reload and voila everything was fine and all my media files available to watch from any device on my network.
Hope this is helpful.