How to Remote Access without Port Forwarding

Plex Media Server Remote Access
1

Server Version#: 1.18.0.1913
Player Version#: God knows, does it matter?
Sorry to have to ask this but I’m kinda rubbish with network setup. The automatic remote access tells me I’m not reachable from outside my network. When consulting a video on how to get port forwarding going on my router I learnt that I, due to not having a native ipv4 adress (you tell me what that means to me), I can’t setup port forwarding. As in, the whole section of the routers menu is just gone. The troubleshooting for remote access makes no mention of what to do in such a case, it relies on the port forwarding. Am I straight out of luck?

Said video (only in german, sadly)

Thank you in advance for any help :slight_smile:

2

Are you 100% sure that you don’t have a valid IP? Go to your WAN status page and check if your IP starts with 100. If yes, you’ll need to follow the steps below to have remote access.

Go to Settings → Network > Enable Relay.

That will allow you to have remote access but with very low picture quality.

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WAN

Get an overview of the status of the internal DHCP client for the WAN

WAN

IPv6 Address:

2a02:810d:0:6:a470:c4bb:7b78:8f27

MAC Address:

98:9d:5d:34:16:07

Duration:

D: 00 H: 00 M: 47 S: 22

Expires:

Fri May 21 3:33:08 2021

IPv6 DNS Server:

2a02:8100:c0:2b9::4:1101

Copy&Pasted as is

4

No ipv4?

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A reverse proxy like HAProxy can be configured to listen on both IPv4 and IPv6, and then proxy inbound connections to either IPv4 or IPv6 backends.

You could always cal your isp and see if it’s possible to get an ip4 addy

Are you sure you don’t have ipv4 turned off on your router? Do you have a router model so I can help you out? Who is your internet service provider?

6

Settings > Network > Enable support for IPV6…

Disable/enable your remote access and check if it goes green.

7

No, simply enabling IPv6 in the Plex settings is not enough. It makes Plex listen on IPv6, but remote clients have no way of knowing how to connect to your server.

Normally over IPv4, Plex does two things automatically:

  1. it publishes a link to all the clients so they know how to reach the server, it looks like https://[ip-address].[server ID].plex.direct:[port]
  2. it opens a port on the router so those incoming connections are forwarded to the server

With IPv6, Plex doesn’t do these two things automatically. It was flagged eight years ago already that this was going to become a problem, but the developers didn’t see it as a priority. Fast forward to 2021, hundreds of millions of residential connections only allow remote access over IPv6, but Plex doesn’t support it.

The steps for setting up remote access over IPv6 with Plex are:

  1. enable IPv6 in the Plex network settings
  2. find out the stable public IPv6 address of your Plex server (ipconfig /all on Windows, ifconfig on macOS, etc)
  3. find out the server ID of your Plex server
  4. with these two things, construct a custom server URL.

Now your remote clients will get that link, and know how to connect to your server.

  1. log on to your router, go to the “IPv6 Firewall” settings. Normally it is set up to block all incoming connections. Set up a rule to open TCP port 32400 towards the stable IPv6 address you found in Step 1.

Now the router will let these incoming connections through.

1 Like
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One of the guys on this forum shows his port forwarding setting. hope this helps. Vodafone Connect Router and Plex media server - cannot access remotely

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