Maybe I’m missing something, but I feel like I’ve searched pretty thoroughly and failed to find it. For security reasons (let’s just call me paranoid and be done with it; I’m a sysadmin by trade) I’m very careful about what ports I open up on my router and how. Opening Plex up (even on a non-standard port) to the world at large isn’t particularly attractive to me, and feels unnecessary, as there’s only a handful of remote IP’s I’d like to connect from.
I threw together a quick firewall rule based on a whitelist that grants access to 32400 for whitelisted IP’s, which works perfectly for the web interface (I can access the web them from the whitelisted IP’s, but it dropps connections from others), but I see no way to tell the Player to connect directly to a specified IP/hostname. I get an Indirect connection at best, and when attempting from a shared account, no connection at all. When I try to configure remote access, the server is (obviously) not reachable by the Plex discovery process and thus I get “Not available outside your network”. If there was a block of IP’s used for discovery that Plex specified, I’d be okay with whitelisting those, but I’m not about to allow 54.0.0.0/8 through (which… from the looks of my firewall logs, seems to be where discovery is coming from, but I’m sifting through a lot of noise).
The simplest/cleanest fix feels like a "try to connect to this server at " option, even something that could be hacked in a config file somewhere. Any means to trick the Player app (hostfiles shenanigans, whatever else) into attempting a direct-connection and bypassing normal discovery, I’d be happy with. Making discovery work would be an attractive solution as well, but opening up the port to AWS at large is… less than ideal.
