Connecting outside the US required for Plex Media Server?

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#:1.41.6
Player Version#:

So I restricted access to my home network to only allow connections in the US, Germany and Australia a few days ago. Today I went to look at my local plex server and view my library only to find that my local directory of movies was disconnected and my plex media server was prompting me to connect to my media and to download plex media server which I was on already…. The link to download the app was also responding with the service being down.

After turning off country filtering on my local network my movie server connected right back up, all the services showed back up in the plex media server etc….

This all implies to me that the server is reaching outside of the US likely to validate my lifetime plex pass membership. If it can’t validate it’s disconnecting the local media and removing services like software update in plex media server…all the while shows me logged in..

What country is it reaching out to and why does the server not present the user with a notice in the UI?

2

Look at the DEBUG logs for your server about a minute after restarting.

In the MyPlex lines, you’ll see your server(s)

I am east coast and use the Newark and Ireland auth servers.

Having US-restricted it, look at the IPs. I suspect you’ll find one or two in Ireland.

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3

I’ll take a look but as a lifetime plex pass member and still being logged in I am surprised that it would invalidate the auth token and dump my library. Feels like it should still allow local when I am on my network and kill remote services.. strange to me

4

Unfortunately no.

They require HTTPS by default
They require the client signs in to the server with each thing you start to do.

It’s been this way since at least 2015/2016. I lobbied hard to relax the requirement but PMS is an “ALWAYS CONNECTED” service.

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5

Thanks for the feedback. I see the MyPlex lines and I see https requests for tokens but how do I decipher the countries I need to open up on my network so I can restrict the rest?

6

take those addresses –

in your browser

search for GeoIP lookup

Enter the addresses

:slight_smile:

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