Simon, that’s not really the issue. I believe that Plex listens on all interfaces and would receive data/packets. HOWEVER when sending packets back out it’s going to follow your route table and this is usually responsible for sending the traffic back out the VPN interface since it will have a lower metric value.
Carlo
PS I’ve asked several times and no one has answered this yet. What do you want Plex to do differently then it does now? It fully supports VPNs as is.
Any ETA on a fix for this? Bought Plex Pass for a year only to find out it doesn't work with PIA..
I keep saying the same thing over and over. Plex works with PIA and any other VPN service that allows you to configure port forwarding.
You need to login to your PIA account and configure the port forwarding properly.
There is NOTHING TO FIX in Plex.
I keep saying the same thing over and over. Plex works with PIA and any other VPN service that allows you to configure port forwarding.
You need to login to your PIA account and configure the port forwarding properly.
There is NOTHING TO FIX in Plex.
I'm not sure you fully understand what the original poster is requesting and why.
When you enable the Private Internet Access client on a computer, it sets up a network interface for the VPN. Normally, applications will utilize this interface. However, if something goes wrong with the VPN connection, many applications will switch back to the previous, non-VPN interface that still exists. Some applications provide settings that allow you to bind that application to one specific interface only. If that interface loses connection, the application simply stops communicating. I own applications that do this.
I believe the OP is requesting that Plex implement this functionality. I would like to see it also. I want Plex to die if my VPN goes down. I will not allow access to my Plex server unless I'm certain of this.
And it's not just about protecting the PIN from the client side. Some people want the entire connection from their server to the client encrypted. I run this way. I'm on VPN 24x7. I don't want my ISP or anybody else to know whether I'm browsing Amazon, sending family Happy Birthday emails, or anything else. Paranoid? I'm not sure in our current environment.
I keep saying the same thing over and over. Plex works with PIA and any other VPN service that allows you to configure port forwarding.
You need to login to your PIA account and configure the port forwarding properly.
There is NOTHING TO FIX in Plex.
Remote access doesn't work with PIA port forwarding without jumping thru a couple of hoops. Although I understand that it does work with LiquidVPN.
OK still don’t see the issue myself. Plex does listen on all interfaces as far as I know. I played around for a while with a test server and had it running for a couple of weeks on PIA and thought the setup was typical for a public VPN service. You just go to their website and setup a port that’s only available for you in a specific area. You then setup plex to listen on that port and all is good.
As far as the VPN going down and messing up your routes. Yea that will happen and you need to either fire the VPN back up or stop/start Plex to let it establish a new connection back to the mother ship. The rest is in the routes you setup or modify when Plex is running.
I honestly still don’t understand why you guys would want to go through hell to try and run your servers this way. Why not just setup PPTP or OpenVPN and remote in that way so the whole connection is always encrypted? You won’t have route issues or anything doing it this way. It will only be available in your local LAN and if you want access from outside you establish a connection into your own VPN server/Plex server and you have a faster connection that just works.
OK still don't see the issue myself. Plex does listen on all interfaces as far as I know. I played around for a while with a test server and had it running for a couple of weeks on PIA and thought the setup was typical for a public VPN service. You just go to their website and setup a port that's only available for you in a specific area. You then setup plex to listen on that port and all is good.
I can see in the log that Plex does see the VPN interface. I only use my server in a local environment but did try to connect with PIA out of curiosity awhile ago. It looked easy enough but didn't work as I expected it would. My experience found in following link.
OK still don't see the issue myself. Plex does listen on all interfaces as far as I know. I played around for a while with a test server and had it running for a couple of weeks on PIA and thought the setup was typical for a public VPN service. You just go to their website and setup a port that's only available for you in a specific area. You then setup plex to listen on that port and all is good.
As far as the VPN going down and messing up your routes. Yea that will happen and you need to either fire the VPN back up or stop/start Plex to let it establish a new connection back to the mother ship. The rest is in the routes you setup or modify when Plex is running.
I honestly still don't understand why you guys would want to go through hell to try and run your servers this way. Why not just setup PPTP or OpenVPN and remote in that way so the whole connection is always encrypted? You won't have route issues or anything doing it this way. It will only be available in your local LAN and if you want access from outside you establish a connection into your own VPN server/Plex server and you have a faster connection that just works.
I agree with you that setting up port forwarding through PIA and using that port in Plex is not complex.
You then agree that the VPN going down would mess up the routes, but seem to be implying that restarting the VPN and/or Plex is simple enough. This might be true if one is sitting at his computer running interactive applications. For server applications like Plex, however, the impact on privacy could be severe. Streams could be leaking unencrypted for long periods of time. (I'm not going into the reasons one might want a high level of privacy besides piracy. I have no problem having that discussion, but I'm not sure it's on topic for this thread.)
I agree that setting up OpenVPN would solve the problem, but that might be a higher technical hurdle for many PIA users. I believe much of the appeal of VPN services like PIA is the low learning curve. They're almost point and click. Port forwarding is only slightly more involved. This dovetails with Plex's ease of setup and use. If Plex added a field in it's server settings to bind to a specific local network interface, this might still be within the technical reach of many users. There are other server side applications which do provide this option.
Lastly, I'll point out that there is "Kill Switch" option in the PIA client which is supposed to immediately shut down all connections to the Internet if the VPN goes down. I'm not sure how many of the other public VPN services have this.
+1 for me
+1 this would be nice for public VPNs
I was offline on this forum for a while because I let my Plex Pass lapse. I just bought another one. I missed a lot of old posts.
@cayars said:
OK still don’t see the issue myself. Plex does listen on all interfaces as far as I know. I played around for a while with a test server and had it running for a couple of weeks on PIA and thought the setup was typical for a public VPN service. You just go to their website and setup a port that’s only available for you in a specific area. You then setup plex to listen on that port and all is good.
I’m glad to hear that you tested this. It’s weird that we are getting different results (and there are others I know who are also unable to get it working out of the box). What platform are you on?
I’m on Mac, currently, 10.11.5, my Plex Server is up to date and I’m running Viscosity 1.6.4 which is a nice front-end to OpenVPN. Currently OpenVPN 2.3.11.
So here’s my test: I run a torrent client on the same machine (used to be uTorrent but now qBittorrent). I set up a port for both torrents and for Plex on AirVPN. The torrent client can work with the forwarded port without any need for hacking.
But Plex needs the fix in http://forums.plex.tv/discussion/117451/myplex-with-a-vpn-that-supports-port-forwarding/
What could be the cause?
Theoretically, i might be running, say, ipvanish, on my server mainly to mask activities of some other software, such as utorrent. I might still want to be able to access myplex, which currently I haven’t figured out a way to do.
+1 for me as well
PIA: For all the people talking about PIA, they had their own client, so that’s not OpenVPN. I’m talking about OpenVPN access.
Hmm… I just discovered that Plex has released a docker version of Plex, which would give total control over ports. I might check that out.
Just want to leave a post here. With the recent regression in internet privacy policy, VPN-friendly services are going to be even more critical in the future. It’s not even that I want Plex traffic on a VPN, I just want it to work when I have my server on a VPN for other reasons.
Thank you!
@sbwoodside said:
Possible way to fix:PMS should listen on all network interfaces when using manually specified port.
PMS has always done this as long as I’ve been using it (since ~2013), regardless of public port specification, PMS binds to 0.0.0.0:32400.
@Vornath said:
You then agree that the VPN going down would mess up the routes, but seem to be implying that restarting the VPN and/or Plex is simple enough. This might be true if one is sitting at his computer running interactive applications. For server applications like Plex, however, the impact on privacy could be severe. Streams could be leaking unencrypted for long periods of time. (I’m not going into the reasons one might want a high level of privacy besides piracy. I have no problem having that discussion, but I’m not sure it’s on topic for this thread.)
This was solved a long time ago with firewalls.
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I would love to see a simple solution
My setup:
- My VPN provider currently does not allow port forwarding (and I do not want to switch VPN)
- I have a static IP from my ISP
- I use VNC to connect to my computer remotely using my static IP and port forwarding in my router. Works fine.
It would therefore be very good if I was able to manually specify my fixed public IP address in Plex to use for remote access. No I am forced to use the relay solution, which is a great feature, but limits the quality.
Thanks!
@johan.nattochdag said:
It would therefore be very good if I was able to manually specify my fixed public IP address in Plex to use for remote access. No I am forced to use the relay solution, which is a great feature, but limits the quality.
https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200430283-Network
‘Custom Server Access URLs’
You need to also disable ‘Secure Connections’, because the certificate from Plex is not valid for your public IP address.
