I don't have access to my own Plex Server on a VPS

Plex Media Server Remote Access
1

A bit of background: I have been running a Plex installation on my NAS for years and it worked fine. However, I now also wanted to add a second server on a remote VPS.

The VPS runs Ubuntu 22.04. I installed the latest Plex version, set all the permissions and went to the Web interface. Unfortunatel, I get an error that I don’t have permission but that I should open the Plex App to claim it. Unfortunately, I see no way to do so.

I did try to get a code from plex.tv/claim code and added it to my preference xml. That didn’t help either though.

At some point, I don’t know why exactly, I did manage to open the web interface of my remote server, but it seemed to only have tunnelled into my local Plex installation. I only saw my local server with the warning that it was indirectly connected, but not my new, remote server. Then I played around a bit and now I’m back to not being able to open the web interface.

What exactly do I need to do to add a second Server and to claim it as my own, so that I can log into the web interface?

2

Adding the claim code to Preferences.xml isn’t how it’s done.

Given you have access to the shell on the remote machine, I recommend using this shell script to handle the registration and updating Preferences.xml for you.

  1. SSH into the machine.
  2. scp (?) the script to that machine . (or wget it remotely)
  3. run, as root, on the remote,

Instructions and examples are in the README.md

3

Thank you, I think I figured out the issue. As always, just when I decided to post a question regarding an issue, I find the answer. In this case, it was this:

  1. Open a Terminal window or your command prompt
  2. Enter the following command (substituting the IP address of your server as appropriate):
    ssh -L 8888:127.0.0.1:32400 ip.address.of.server
  3. Open a browser window
  4. Type http://127.0.0.1:8888/web into the address bar
  5. The browser will connect to the server as if it were local and load Plex Web App

I tried to log in remotely which didn’t work.