How to Remote Access without Port Forwarding

Plex Media Server Remote Access
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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.

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