That sounds expensive as hell.

Pretty sure something like 10 years ago crashplan deleted a bunch of customer data in a deduplication job gone wrong.

This is the correct answer. Dell, and other oems, have stored their windows keys in firmware on motherboards for years now. You could literally install on a fresh drive and it should auto activate. Typically at most you have to go to click activate yourself.

This is all assuming the machine came with a pro license and wasn’t upgraded of course. It should have a sticker on it.

Also thank you for pointing this out. Not sure how I missed this. I already looked in the passwd file to make sure it was an actual user account, they’re right next to exciter and had the same uid. You saved me a boat load of time trying to figure that one out. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

This was the issue. I did an update recently of truenas and apparently the polkitd user took over the uid for my plex account. Unfortunately it looks like this also caused some level of corruption since even changing the uid and gid haven’t fixed the issue and plex is borked.

Luckily I have backups, so not all is lost, and even if it was, I could probably just regenerate that data.