I have plex set up on a PC running windows 7 and am mainly interested in accessing it at home within my network. Worked fine for a long time but recently I’m getting the server unavailable message or an indirect connection on any other device on my network. No changes have been made to the network or router. It’s not convenient to operate it directly from the Win 7 machine so casting to chromecast is my preferred method.
I’ve tried port forwarding and setting up remote access in case it helps but no change. Any suggestions?
Let me know if additional information would be helpful in tracking down the problem.
Thanks for the suggestions; checked the pc firewall and its set as private. I’ve changed settings on the router (a hitron cgnv4) to see if it makes any difference but there’s no improvement.
As before the plex server is viewable on my pc but any other device on the same network (the way I generally wish to acces plex) cannot connect. I just get a message that the server is unavailable.
I have just one router in my network and no repeaters or such devices. The server is wired connected but all the clients are attempting to access it wirelessly.
ok one ‘client’ is my macbook where i use the plex webapp in my broswer. I’ve connected the laptop to the router via a cable and there is no change. Server now showing as unreachable all the time.
Do you usually notice, when your router gets a firmware update or config policy pushed to it by your ISP?
Are you able to set basic configuration in your router yourself? Or is it locked up pretty tight?
I’d like you to try out setting an alternate DNS server for your whole network - but only if you are comfortable with it. Because if you do something wrong, in the worst case you’d be without internet.
If you are OK with it, try to set the primary DNS server to the IP address 8.8.8.8
These are Google’s servers and are reliably fast with updates (which cannot be said about every ISP’s DNS servers).
Changing this requires again rebooting every device involved, starting with the router, then server, then client devices. Always with a few minutes waiting time inbetween.
made the DNS changes and still have a connection to the internet. Unfortunately nothing has changed with my set up. My plex account is running fine on my main pc but any client device on the same wifi network shows plex as indirect or unavailable.
Did you put it into a VM perhaps?
If you did that, keep in mind that by default VMs are not ‘bridged’ into the local network, but use their own NAT. And that would put your server into a separate network and made it impossible for other clients to communicate directly with it.
yes thats a good point. It is on a VM but I have my own physical network card on the motherboard of this machine. Its dedicated to the VM. I thought that would be enough to get around that issue and it was working fine for a while. Recently its stopped working with no changes made to the setup.
You have to explicitly define that you want to ‘bridge’ the host network into the VM.
(Unless you are forwarding the whole network device to the VM, so that it doesn’t appear in the host at all. But I have no experience with this use case).
Do this to confirm this suspicion:
Settings - Server - Remote Access
which IP address is shown as the server’s private IP? Is it from the same network range like the rest of your local network?
