For the past few days, I haven’t been able to stream anything to anyone. I can still play locally, but I’ve tried several locations, and can’t get a stream to play (i.e. parent’s house, my office.) I’ve tried multiple devices (Fire Stick, or Plex on Windows 10), no joy. I have 2 separate Plex Servers (my main one, and a laptop back-up). The laptop can sometimes get a stream through but it buffers every couple seconds.
I’m thinking it must be firewall related to my router, but not really sure why that would suddenly be the case, as both servers are fully accessible. I thought it might have been because of that fiber cut that Xfinity suffered a few days ago, but upload speeds test fine.
Does anyone have any pointers on how to start troubleshooting?
BigWheel posted this and on my set-up it was the problem.
BigWheel Plex Employee
I am also curious what protocol folks have set in router. Seen a few reports recently of folks with both TCP&UDP enabled having issues getting Remote access working. PMS only needs TCP.
Thank you for the link–I tried changing to TCP only, and no discernible difference. I think it must be something to do with my network, but nothing has changed. I don’t have any trouble accessing my server from plex.tv–I just can’t stream anything, which kind of sucks, lol!
Sure thing. I’m not going to pretend that I can read this, but I notice a lot of “[Notify] Now Watching” entries. Obviously I’m not trying to watch a different show ever half second, so is that a symptom of something being wrong as well?
Please check the upload speed of your internet connection and restart your router and your Plex server. It took more than 1 minute to send the first video segment (7MB) to the client.
Then, please try again to stream a video and upload the new logs.
Edit: I just saw something else. The first connection from client to server, where the client queries the format and video playback mode for the file, gets terminated prematurely. So there is definitely a network problem. Does the router reboot help?
My router is set to reboot every night, and I tried rebooting my servers. I agree that it’s a network issue, as it’s affecting both of my servers. I tried an iperf test and I’m maxing out my gigabit network, with no issues on communication. This only happened a few days ago. Since nothing has changed on my network, I can only assume that it’s a change from a server update. It appears that numerous other people are having this problem.
My server mounts network drives to pull the media, based on my old setup. I do have the ability to transfer some media to local drives, so I’ll create a local library at my next opportunity in order to eliminate the network, and verify that that works. Not a fix by any means, but will help diagnose.
I can say that nothing has changed on my server (r710 dual x5690s), and I just completed a 14 hour stress run to verify stability.
Lastly, thank you very much for taking the time to try and help me with this.
Did you do the usual stuff? Use an external port other than 32400, set this port manually in the Plex Remote Access settings of the server and specify the port forwarding rule manually in your router. And disable “Enable local network discovery (GDM)” in the Plex Network settings.
To answer your question, yes, all that has been done. However, I think I need to apologize for wasting your time. From further experimentation, despite my iperf tests, I think there’s a fundamental problem with smb/CIFS on my NAS (I’ve got a Turris Omnia router with the NAS perk, and something seems to have borked smb/CIFS.) This is most likely not a Plex Server issue. Again, many thanks for helping me troubleshoot this. If I get that issue fixed, and it turns out that was indeed the problem, I’ll update this thread to clear PMS’ good name.
