So I’m on an RV trip and I roll into an RV Park which happens to have pretty decent wifi. After hooking up everything to my RV I am surprised to see my PMS from my house working! I even watched through a whole episode of a program I like streaming it quite well.
Later that night I cannot connect to my home PMS nor could I connect to it the next day. It simply says that my server is currently unavailable. Now nothing has changed. I haven’t gone to another RV Park, the wifi is the same, etc. Why can’t I connect (troubleshooting advice says things like making sure your PMS is up to date and started, etc., none of which I can do from the road.
Additionally, I am connected to a friend’s PMS and that one connects and is working fine.
Now it could simply be that something messed up at home like a power surge, etc., and my PMS if offline but I really don’t think that’s the case.
What can one do when they are on the road and can’t get connected to the home PMS. A lot of the troubleshooting is useless unless you are at home or have somehow enabled you to get into your LAN at home remotely (which is not something I wish to do because of security concerns).
If you won’t do remote access to your system outside of the Plex interface, you can’t do anything else. You are stuck until you return home. The Plex interface only allows you to work within Plex and manage content and settings within a properly functioning server. You can’t go back into your network after the fact if something breaks and you have not setup remote access.
If your friend’s PMS is up and you can’t access yours, you either have a config problem, or yours crashed for some reason. You should be able to discern a crash easily upon return.
I agree I can do more when I get home. Doesn’t it follow that if I had a config problem then it shouldn’t have worked in the first place? I mean I didn’t change the configuration at home (obviously, since I’m not there and don’t have remote access) and the config on my laptop hasn’t changed. Indeed the wifi is the same too. I guess it could have crashed though my Synology PWS has been up for 45 days straight without an issue.
I guess the wifi could have changed somehow blocking port 32400 but it seems unlikely that suddenly the RV park had a rash of Plex serving guests and needed to shut that down. I wish I knew my router’s IP so I could use something like canyouseeme.org to ascertain whether or not that’s open.
But I also have other users who sometimes complain that they can’t get to my server and often I’ll check the Remote access switch and it’ll say that my server is not available from outside my home. I toggle it off and on and it says it can connect from outside but shortly thereafter it toggles back saying it can’t be connected to from outside, yet I can still connect to it from outside. I do this by turning off my wifi on my cell phone, thus using my cellular data plan and not on my home LAN and I can still connect. It’s as if that config toggle for Allow Remote Access really doesn’t seem to work right
It would certainly be weird if it was a config issue, but it can’t be ruled out. Some routers like Xfinity owned routers, have a ‘smart’ firewall on them that will block Plex after a period of time, and then unblock it. Smart right? Not really! I don’t know all the details on that, as I circumvented all that madness with my own gear vs using their rental devices.
I doubt that it is your RV Park network that is doing the blocking. Unless your friend manually changed their port, they’d be on 32400 as well. Both servers would logically be down.
I don’t know Synology or their configurations. So if and when you’re ready to tackle remote access issues upon your return to home, I’d open a new thread specifically for that topic.
Well I don’t have an Xfinity, I’m on Cox with a Paramonic or something like that. AFAICT it doesn’t shut off access and depending on your definition of “period of time”, I’ve been locked out for over a day now.
Good point on the “port 32400 should be open since you can get to your friends PMS”. I agree.
I will report more when I get home next week but I don’t see the logic in opening yet another thread that says “I can’t access my PMS server from outside my home”. It makes is just more difficult since others searching for similar issues would be bombarded with tons of threads essentially the same topic.
Yeah, even I misunderstood the thing about Xfinity. Their crap gear blocks Plex every 30 days, and you have to manually override it until the block happens again…
I can’t say this will or will not fix your issue, but I set a static port to something other than 32400 on my Plex config, and manually port forward that through my router. I’ve not had external issue since I’ve made that change. YMMV.
Well I don’t think that Xfinity is my problem because I don’t have Xfinity. But maybe Cox is doing something similarly? I was gonna try manual port forwarding but the Cox router has this stupid thing where you go to do port forwarding and they send you to something like wifi.cox.com to do the configuration. And there are many pages that I googled to understand how to use that page to do my port forwarding but the things that the pages were saying to click on just didn’t exist there. I think I saw somewhere else that Cox removed the ability to Port Forward! Could this mean that Cox is now acting like Xfinity? Do I have to call them and say “Mother may I”? That’d suck!
Yeah, I used to have my own router and would configure it myself but it was complicated and error-prone and my home networking has gotten a lot more complex since then (Google homes, Next Thermo, IoT lights, etc. I know I could get a cheap but functional router/wifi thing and eventually supplant the rented stuff but I’d rather not have to.
I know Cox are asswipes (<- creative cursing can get you around silly censorship) in that they block port 25 so I couldn’t use my mail server ON MY OWN DOMAIN THAT I’M NOT USING TO SEND SPAM until I merely just ssh tunneled around the stupid limitation!
Ewww… that sounds eerily similar to what Xfinity may have configured. No guarantee that it is, but why the heck do you need to go to some cloud infrastructure when the device is in your own home. Not cool…
Agreed. But why did it work yesterday? That’s still the mystery. I know that my Synology was up for 45 days when I left and that’s longer than the 30 days you mentioned.
What’s it like talking to your ISP about this? I mean are they gonna get mad and say “Well you just can’t do that - it’s not supported” or should I come in from the angle of “well I got this security camera and it needs to have this port forwarded to work right. How do I do that?” then just translate the instructions over to port 32400?
Re: tunnel to use RDP. First, RDP?!? I’m on Linux. No RDP here. Secondly, how would I ssh tunnel to my house? I don’t have a static IP to my house. Instead what I do is ssh tunnel port 25 from within my home LAN to my Linux Web/SMTP,/etc server running in the cloud (defaria.com). I can ssh, even from the RV Park to defaria.com and I have even ssh tunneled from the RV Park to defaria.com in the cloud so that I could use my email server. That works. But defaria.com is not running Plex nor is it in my home LAN. So AFAICT I cannot use ssh to get into my home network to debug.
And I’m not totally dead in the water as I anticipated this and had downloaded a few series from my Plex Server to my laptop in case I had spotty connections. But I’m trying to troubleshoot this as it gives me the chance to experience what it’s like for my other users.
What’s it like talking to your ISP about this? Yeah, technically running any sort of server breaks most ISP’s TOS for residential service. So… Not sure how I’d broach that topic with them. Most ISPs turn a rather blind eye to many of the home servers, with exception to Mail servers and won’t pursue them unless there is a glaring problem that puts them in a bad light. However, fessing up to having a server on their residential connection may not win you any technical support in getting it running.
I see what you mean about your SSH tunnel. I’m barely above novice level with Linux, and I’m getting a bit more rusty with each passing day. Wasn’t sure what devices you had at home. Either way, with my limited network understanding, I don’t see how you could SSH back through your config. I thought you had a direct tunnel in/out of your address via port forwarding.
That’s why I said the “security camera” angle. From what I read about the “Cox and its wifi.cox.com here’s how to do port forwarding” posts many had said they got Cox to do it because otherwise, their IoT security cameras would not work. Cox appeared to be sympathetic to such customers probably because a security camera can hardly be thought of as a server. But if it’s the Cox engineer who does the port opening I’m worried if I say “Yeah can I have port 32400 opened - that’s what my ‘security cam’ uses” they might be hip to that and deny me.
I’ve run servers at home in the past (defaria.com) but have since moved it to the cloud. When running a server at home you need a static IP (I know there are DynDNS stuff and the like but I wanted to be legit and to be reliable). One ISP charged me $25/month just to have a static IP! What?!? It’s a one-time configuration to a zone file and you’re done! No way that’s “worth” $25/month. But I was a business then and just wrote it off as an expense. Your data plans and speeds are much more expensive and actually slower. Not a good deal at all.
I know a lot about Linux (all I run is Linux at home, including Linux on my MacBook) and a pretty lot about ssh, but there are tons of options for ssh. They’re maybe a way to tunnel into my house using ssh from my cloud instance but I really don’t want to worry about people having an avenue to get into my home LAN and poke around.
I wish there were some documentation about how exactly Plex figures out how to get to my home Synology NAS running PMS when I don’t have a static IP to tie to. I think I basically know that it somehow registers my PMS, associates it with a token, and knows my router’s IP address. Then UPnP (or static port mapping) allows others to come in through port 32400 to talk to my PMS directly. But what happens if my router’s IP address changes? Cause if it doesn’t then I could just run any server at home right?
And what is this insecure vs non-insecure access to PMS. Is that just like http vs https?
Worst case for me, I get a new IP address every year+. I bought my own domain name, and tie that to my current ip address, and keep my modem on a UPS. When the time comes that I do get a new IP, I’m down for as long as it takes to update my DNS records. Cheaper than asking for a static, and far cheaper than getting a business package. I agree they’re more expensive, and slower!
You could beat the engineer that might be hip to 32400 and use your own favorite port number. They wouldn’t have any way of knowing what that is other than to test the response from the port themselves if they’re so inclined to do so. At that point, it wouldn’t matter what port you use as they’d be onto your every move.
AFAIK, your query on how the heck does Plex.tv know how to connect to your system… I believe you’re thought process is pretty spot on. I think your server instance reaches out to Plex.tv with server name, ip address, server owner and port number. How those contents are presented is all way above my pay-grade. Somewhere within that, would also be friend / home shares. I’ve no idea about how often that ping to the cloud infrastructure happens, but it would appear to be pretty quick. If you move IP addresses, power up your server, Plex appears to point external connections to your new address pretty fast.
I believe that the secure vs insecure is tied to TLS. I think it was the beginning of Oct, Plex fully depreciated TLS 1.1? That killed access to a crapload of ‘smart’ TVs that never get their firmware updated. The only somewhat workable solution was to disable secure connections and use the TVs without signing in, severely crippling their ability to play content.
I knew enough about Linux to get the open source F.O.G. project server up and running as an imaging server. And most recently, I’ve spun up a Univention server to host my OwnCloud instance since OwnCloud stopped supporting Windows. Neither are a proficiency for me. At least F.O.G. was intranet only. I’m at risk with an exposed Unvention / OwnCloud instance. But all that is outside of your original query… I’ve digressed.
As I said, I’m not really looking to be able to get into my home LAN from the road that often and I appreciate the security of not having that generally available. When I used to run defaria.com from home it was a pain because every time I moved (and I moved a lot) my email server would be in the moving van until I got to the new place, got a new static IP, and set it up.
The idea of using an alternate port to 32400 is intriguing and I guess I thought I’d have to tell my users to use that alternate port but the way you describe it, that Plex knows what IP address and port to send traffic, would mean that this would be transparent to those users.
So I think I need to go off and find out what are common ports for things like security cams and use that port number. Heaven forbid I ask Cox to port forward ports like 25, 80, 443, etc…
Thanks for all your help and discussion. Here’s to hoping I can solve this now and that others who trip upon this post get something out of it.
Well I got home and found my Synology Plex server having some sort of network issue. I had to restart my VPN connection to PIA to another area before it started working again. Strange.
