Recently set up my media server. I was able to get remote access working despite my apparent double-NAT situation, summarized in brief: I have an AT&T-provided combo modem/router (BGW320-500), which is upstairs, and my primary desktop computer/plex server machine is downstairs, so I hooked up an eero router to create a secondary network downstairs, which the plex server is directly connected to via wifi.
After setting up port forwarding in both the eero and the AT&T router, I am able to remotely access my server from anywhere and any network EXCEPT for my original primary AT&T network upstairs, provided by the combo modem/router. It functions perfectly on my eero network and every outside network I’ve tried, including cellular data. My AT&T router network, however, is limited to connecting via relay, and shows the error message that a direct connection to the server is unavailable.
So - why is my AT&T router the only one on the planet prohibited from directly accessing my server, and what can I do to fix it? The reason it matters is that my upstairs TV is connected to that router via ethernet. I imagine there must be some simple fix here I haven’t tried.
because you have two LANs so it sees the AT&T one as being remote since your server is on the EERO
Have AT&T as well but that is only acting as a bridge to my other network router. Nothing else is connected to the AT&T.
it sounds like you need to use the EERO as en extension of the At&T router so the ATT is the one assigning IPs to everything over DHCP so it is one network instead of two
Yeah my thoughts were to either (1) put the eero in bridge mode and try running everything as one network or (2) run another ethernet connection from my AT&T router directly to the server PC.
The strange issue is that I can get a direct connection remotely from anywhere BUT my AT&T router - so it isn’t that it’s treating the AT&T router as remote, which is what I was hoping to achieve. Rather, the AT&T router is the only device prohibited from connecting directly for whatever reason.
Does anyone know why this might be? To clarify - I’m fine with connecting remotely from my second network, but it is not letting me do so for this network ONLY. Cellular works, outside networks work, remote access otherwise fully up and running.
The problem here likely isn’t just that you have multiple networks, rather that they are cascaded (the Eero network is “behind” the AT&T network). This poses a problem for routing, as the AT&T network’s clients don’t know how to reach the Eero network’s clients directly; everything will be sent to the default route for the AT&T network for traffic in that direction.
For example, if the LAN network on the AT&T router is 192.168.1.0/24 and that of the Eero network is 172.16.0.0/24, 192.168.1.100 will not be able to send packets to 172.16.0.100; there is no route to those hosts. Everything will be sent to the default route. And the default route will try to send private traffic via the public Internet (or just outright fail) and that is not going to work. Thus falling back to Plex Relay.
If your AT&T router allowed you to create static routes, you could configure it such that network traffic destined to 172,16.0.0/24 would route to the “WAN” IP address of the Eero router, and it would take it from there. But most consumer-grade, ISP-provided routers do not provide this functionality (but you could check).
Something to try would be to set a custom server access URL in the Settings → [Server Name] → Network settings. Set it to be the public/WAN IP address of your Eero router including the public port you’re forwarding on that router. In my example above, that IP address might be 192.168.1.50 (check on the Eero router). The final URL to enter would be something like:
This assumes that the public port you configured in the port forwarding rule for Plex on the Eero router was 32400.
This will cause Plex Media Server to publish that address/port combination as a connection resource. Hopefully your local clients will choose that as the most appropriate resource to use.
If that doesn’t work, feel free to share your actual IP addresses/ranges (except for the actual public IP of your AT&T router), along with your existing port forwarding rules.
That sounds like an exactly correct diagnosis of the issue.
Fortunately, setting my eero to bridge mode and then simply setting the AT&T router to port forward directly to the server device appears to have worked.
I am curious if the custom serve access URL solution would also have done the trick - I recall attempting something similar when messing around earlier but may have used an incorrect input - in any event it didn’t work when attempting to connect from a device connected to the AT&T router, as before.
