Getting a Direct Connection with a VPN (Fixing always an "indirect connection" when under VPN)

Plex Media Server
1

Hello!

I did a lot research and troubleshooting on this topic and couldn’t find information. I’d like to post what I discovered.

I built a small plex server out of a laptop recently. Still working on NAS storage and whatnot, but I was focused on setting up the network configuration properly first. I installed a VPN because of other things that the server was doing in the background. When I did this, I noticed that on my PC on the same LAN showed an “Indirect Connection” to my new plex server. If I turned off the VPN, it would be “Nearby”.

I tried a lot of different things, researched split tunneling, and tried it with the PrivadoVPN I was using. Nothing worked. I finally installed a new VPN with a whitelist feature (SurfShark) and even without whitelisting, it allowed for a direct connection to my plex server. I still need clarification on why. However, I noticed that my server no longer had working remote access. Once I did whitelist it, the remote access worked great too.

Not sure if I overspent and it was configurable with the old VPN if I kept trying, but I don’t really care. The setup with SurfShark was so easy that it was worth the couple of bucks I spent.

Just wanted to put this out there for other newbies to plex servers and VPNs.

Server Version#:
Player Version#: 4.37.2

2

Sorry to bother you, is this still working with surfshark? Did you just whitelist plex.lnk or did you do something else?

3

Sort of. As I said above, I could get the connections to work how I wanted and even steam off Plex just fine. The connections stayed direct, but I discovered a few days/weeks after this post that my Plex library stopped updating and I couldn’t change any server settings. Very weird result. Sorry, i should have edited my post. I ended up having to Reinstall Plex completely, and I moved all the traffic that I wanted behind a VPN to an Ubuntu virtual machine on VM ware player that I was able to set up for free. Now the VM connects through a VPN, but the host PC (and plex) does not.

Sorry, this probably isn’t much help to you, but that was how I worked around this issue.

4

I appreciate the reply, I don’t know much about vpns and most I have read says Plex doesn’t take kindly to tunneling through the vpn regardless of the provider (from what I have read at least). I don’t want to have to turn the vpn on / off when I want to connect remotely. I am fine not having plex behind the vpn but I don’t want to keep trying different companies to see if one works.