TLDR; the account owner login can access the service in most cases, while all other accounts can only see “On Plex Shows”. The only place the owner account doesn’t work, is on the local server via app.plex.tv, there localhost:32400 works.
The full story:
A couple weeks ago, the ethernet cable to my media server (Intel NUC) got mashed and quit working. The server switched over to wifi and appeared to work just fine. I changed the NAT rules in PFSense to point at the Wifi IP address for the server before I discovered that the cable needed to be replaced. Since then, things have rolled down hill.
What am I missing? Below are as many details that I can think to share followed by the my problem solving attempts…
The current situation:
- All accounts are non-managed accounts
- Server is running version 1.30.0.6486
- Plex Web is running version 4.87.2
- All Roku’s and cell phone apps are running the latest versions available in the App Stores
- Using the Plex app within the network, works only for the admin account
- 2 Roku devices on separate VLANs
- Cell phone on the main network
- Non-admin users show only “On Plex shows” shows
- Using Chrome or Edge from a PC on the same network
- Neither admin or user accounts work, shows “On Plex shows”, but none of my media
- Developer mode logging shows a consistent failure to load https://{external-ip-address}.{random-code}.plex.direct:56400/
- My external Port is 56400 which is NAT’d to 32400 internally
- Opening the https://{external-ip-address}.{random-code}.plex.direct:56400/ URL in a browser gives a " took too long to respond. " error
- Outside of the network (from cellular network or different house)
- Cell phone app works just fine using the admin account
- Non-admin accounts only see “On Plex shows”
- From the media server itself
- https://app.plex.tv only shows “On Plex shows” for admin or non-admin accounts
- http://127.0.0.1:32400/web/index.html works perfectly only for the admin user
- When signed in as a non-admin user, clicking on “Get Plex Media Server”, the browser gets stuck in an infinite loop https://plex.tv/api/v2/users/signin with a 429 “Too Many Requests” error
- Remote Access is showing “Fully accessible outside your network”.
- I’ve disabled it twice and re-enabled it just to verify
- Showing advanced options, it shows it NAT’ing from 56400 externally to 32400 internally, a configuration that has been functioning normally for 4+ years.
My network is routed by a PFSense firewall. Other than changing the NAT rules to forward to the Wifi IP address when ethernet was not working and has since been changed back.
Last Friday I removed PFBlockerNG, lots of plex.tv addresses were getting sent to the sink hole. Further yet, this evening I discovered that even though PFBlockerNG and all related rules had been removed, requests to analytics.plex.tv were still being sent to the sink hole. I reinstalled PFBlockerNG, flip the flag to “Keep settings”, then uninstalled it again. It does not appear to be sending any more requests to the sink hole and the states table is showing empty when filtering by the sink hole IP.
I’ve gone as far as disabling the Windows Firewall on the media server. I’ve since re-enabled because it was working as expected previously.
The network in use on the media server (Windows 10 with latest updates) are all set a private networks.
DNS Resolver on PFSense has these custom options enabled:
server: private-domain: "plex.direct"
server: include: /var/unbound/pfb_dnsbl.*conf
Doing an NSLookup against PFSense for the plex.direct address that I found using developer mode in Chrome, gives me my external IP Address. All DNS requests are NAT’d to DNS Resolver (ports 53 & 853), so query attempts to 8.8.8.8 show the same results.
On the media server I’ve logged out and logged back in using the admin account. I’ve also disassociated the media server from the admin account and re-added it.
Any advice is greatly appreciated!
