Getting Plex Remote Access to work reliably with VPN

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I wanted to post this simply to share my experience and results in getting Plex Remote Access to work reliably with a VPN.

I’m running PMS on Windows 10, with a FiOS G1100 router, and using PIA VPN.

Prior to attempting to use Plex w/ VPN, Remote Access was working fine. I simply enabled Remote Access and allowed it to update port forwarding rules on my router via UPnP. I did have to turn off “Enable Automatic Cleanup of Old Unused UPnP Services” on my FiOS router (found that in another discussion thread).

In order to retain Remote Access when my PMS is connected to the PIA VPN, I used xflak’s VPN Bypass utility (search these forums for xflak and you’ll find much info on this, huge thanks to xflak!). It worked initially but after an hour (or two or three) it would stop working.

I solved the problem by

  1. Manually specifying the Remote Access public port in PMS – this disables the UPnP auto-update of router firewall port forwarding rules so you have to then configure port forwarding manually on your router. Go to Plex -> Settings -> Server -> Remote Access, check Manually specify public port, and enter the port number (you can use any number between 20000 and 60000, the internal plex port is 32400, for security reasons I used different public port and pointed it to 32400 in the port forwarding rules on my router).
  2. Disabling UPnP on my router – UPnP is a security risk and should be turned off if possible. No idea if this helped in solving the problem but since I no longer had any good reason to keep it on, I turned it off.
  3. Configured port forwarding on my router. On the FiOS G1100 you do the following (on other routers it’ll be slightly different):
    Login to Router -> Firewall -> Port Forwarding
    Click Advanced
    Select your PMS IP from the Select IP dropdown menu
    Application to Forward -> Custom Ports
    Protocol = TCP, Source Ports = Any, Destination Ports = (PMS public port selected in step 1 above), Forward to Port = 32400 (the PMS internal Remote Access port)
    Click Add
    Once created, should shows as:
    [PC name] [PC IP]:32400 Destination Ports [PMS Public port], TCP Any -> [PMS Public Port]

Remote access is now working great with the VPN, has been solid for many days without a problem.

I found the following discussion threads and article useful:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/200931138-troubleshooting-remote-access/
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/220891/remote-access-not-working-with-fios-g1100 (June 2016)
https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/128495/cant-see-my-library-from-outside-network (November 2014)

Hope this info helps someone out there.

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2

hey,
i have been trying to get PIA & PMS to play nice for about 2 weeks now. I followed your steps (i also have a fios router & windows 10), but xflak’s script isnt working for me. It keeps on timing out. According to his readme, i need to disable IPV6, which i did, but still no luck. Any advice?

Edit: Oh & i checked the port forwarding without PIA enabled & that works fine, btw

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Thanks agossett, this worked for me using NordVPN. My remote access is working with my VPN activated, however, the green check mark indicating remote access, isn’t. In fact, my Plex remote status in settings still says “Not available outside your network." All status indicators are that remote access isn’t available, but when I use my phone to access plex (I turn off my wifi network access and just use LTE to simulate external access), I can connect and play files remotely thru the active VPN. I also had an external shared user (friend) try and it works for them also. It does transcode the file and throttle the connection, but is pretty stable otherwise. Again, the status still indicates Plex is not available outside my network. I am using the xflak script with a Task scheduler on Windows 10 with NordVPN following the instructions above (pretty much to the letter except my PMS Destination port is the same as my Public port). Exact instructions including link to script are here–https://takeitfromageek.com/android/plex-with-vpn/#comments