All was working and suddenly you’re not authorized to access the server;
You’re directed to the Settings page to “re”-claim your server;
You click on the grey “Claim” button, it kind of flashes but nothing happens;
You read the “New Claiming Requirements” post and think that you have to sign out first, then find the Plex tray icon, right-click on it and click on “Open Plex…” only to arrive at a page that gets stuck on a “Getting Ready…” infinite loop and again, nothing happens;
You try reinstalling Plex thinking something got corrupted, but no cigar…
You find a topic on Plex documentation that tells you to remove Windows registry keys (or other settings for different platforms) and start over, but it only makes things worse;
You finally resign yourself to completely uninstalling Plex, losing all your customizations and downloaded subtitles, and after reinstalling everything… you still have the same problem;
You download the troubleshooting logs, but find it difficult to make sense of anything in it;
As a last resort, you scour the Plex forum one more time, you read dozens of different topics on the same subject and finally comes across something you never thought could be the culprit: DNS;
You change the “automatic DNS” setting on your server that uses your service provider’s DNS to a manually set DNS server, pointing to something like Cloudflare DNS;
Voilà! All works now! You can claim your server, no more “Getting Ready” loop.
If you are going through some of the steps/symptoms above (hopefully you’re still early in the chain), I hope this post will help you. Try reconfiguring your DNS from automatically configured by DHCP to manually set to a reputable DNS server like Cloudflare’s.
I don’t know why all of a sudden my service provider’s DNS stopped working. It might have been some change in Plex’s infrastructure. I’ll never know. But given that Plex appears to use Cloudflare for their infrastructure, it felt to me that using Cloudflare’s DNS server was a safer bet. And indeed, it all started working as soon as I made that change. To note, I never tried another reputable DNS such as Google’s. Again, because I stuck with the one that lives in the same infrastructure used by Plex.
Cloudflare’s DNS is 1.1.1.1, and you can configure a secondary DNS as 1.0.0.1
If you also have IPv6 enabled, I suggest manually configuring Cloudflare’s IPv6 DNS servers too. The primary one is 2606:4700:4700::1111 and the secondary is 2606:4700:4700::1001
If you search the Internet for Cloudflare DNS IP Addresses you’ll get all the information you need.
I hope I can help spare someone the pain I went through.
I added cloudflare on my Windows 11 system this did not work. I then added the IPv6 DNS entries to the NAS and it did not work. Finally I added the IPv4 addresses and under advanced tab selected to use IPv4 first and then I was allowed to claim the server. Your post was exactly what I needed to solve the problem. I did need to re-add my media libraries and they are being built as I write this reply.
I’m having the same issue on MacOS, but pointing the DNS at Cloudflare didn’t help. Just getting the infinite loop web page. IPv6 is disabled on my router. Can’t claim server and now I can’t even access the settings page for said router. Any additional help would be appreciated.
When I try to claim server through Safari, the button greys out and then just returns. When I try it with Firefox, I get a login screen. When I type in my info, I then get a message saying there was an error logging in.
You can verify if your DNS setting is working by opening command prompt/terminal and running nslookup plex.tv. The server should be the DNS server that you configured and the answer for plex.tv should match with here.
It matches. But I still can’t claim server. Everything was working fine until I added some media to a library. Wanted to scan for new files, but my main account no longer had access to the server. Sub accounts did, until I tried everything to get the main account back online. Now nothing works and I just get a repeat of the OP.
Also, checking for updates fails, “Something went wrong”. When I click on “Please install manually” in Safari, I get the Plex download page, but it says something is wrong there and to check back later. When I do that same thing through Firefox, I get the actual download links. I don’t know where else to go from here.
When I click on Open Plex from the menu bar, it opens a new tab in my browser trying to connect to 127.0.0.1/… Why would it try connecting to that IP address? How can I verify that this is correct?
Final edit, I changed the DNS to google and now it all worked. What an absolutely frustrating event.
I was having the exact same issue and spent most of today troubleshooting. Thank goodness I found this recent post. Changing the DNS to the recommended Cloudflare DNS settings on my QNAP NAS ethernet ports (4 of them) to 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 cleared the problems I was able to claim my Plex Server back!
By the way, my current ISP is AT&T. I checked the configuration on their provided Humax BGW320-500 Modem/Router and I could not find a way to change the DNS settings; I could just view them.
127.0.0.1 is a local address used by every IP enabled device. It is also referred to as the loopback address. It is contained within the device and not routed to the network. It is useful when you only need to connect to another process on the same system (such as a web browser connecting to the Plex Media Server application).
Many ISP DNS servers do not resolve Plex hostnames correctly or are slow doing so.
That is why you will see the recommendation for a Plex Media Server to use a public DNS server such as 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare), 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 (Google), and 9.9.9.9 (Quad 9). The public servers are scaled larger and more responsive than many ISP DNS servers.
Unfortunately, AT&T will not let you change the DNS settings (I’ve the same device).
It does not matter for most devices. However, for my Plex server & NAS, I use fixed IP addresses outside of the DHCP range. That makes it easy to use whatever DNS server I want.
I’m glad you were able to figure it out. After re-reading my original post, I realized I didn’t go into enough details regarding how I replaced the automatic DNS settings on my Plex Server running Windows 11.
I said “you change the automatic DNS settings on your server,” which could be confusing. The correct statement should’ve been “you change the DNS settings on Windows 11 (where I run my Plex Server) from automatic to manually set…”
I’ll edit the post soon to make it clearer based on everyone’s feedback. Thanks!
Tell me about it… I was pissed about losing all my custom settings and subtitles before I finally got it to work after changing my DNS settings.
Funny it didn’t work for you with Cloudflare’s DNS. Perhaps MacOS required a reboot or some other kind of cache clearing. My server runs on a Windows 11 so I didn’t have a chance to try the DNS solution on MacOS. I did install Plex Server on an old iMac 2015 that I still use just to check if it would make a difference - before I learned about the DNS thing - but since it too didn’t work at the time, I gave up on it and went back to my original server.
I’m unsure as to why, but your Plex server needs to “phone home” to another server that happens to register as being in Ireland. Without that access, the Plex server will stall until it times out and then fail to launch. As a result, you won’t be able to load the GUI and you won’t be able to claim your server if or when the server finally launches (think minutes).
