Indirect Access when Remote Access is Successfully Enabled

General Discussions
1

Server and Clients are all on the latest version.

I’ve been able to connect to my Plex server remotely without issue over the past several years. Then all of the sudden, when I was on vacation, my connection to Plex became indirect access. I haven’t tried port forwarding, but I’ve never needed to in the past. I’m wondering what has caused this. If it’s my server itself or some Plex settings I need to change/update.

Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

2

Something I forgot to mention was I am on an Unraid OS.

3

Port forwardings which are established automatically by (UPnP) will nowadays have often only a limited life time.
If you have regularly stopped and restarted Plex (or the whole machine) when you were at home, you might have not noticed it. Because Plex will try to establish the port forwarding at start.
But now that you were away for a while longer, these frequent restarts are not happening, and thus the port forwarding is expiring.

Expiring of automatically established port forwardings is something which might have only been introduced recently by a router change, or a router firmware update.

Whatever the reason was: switch to a manual port forwarding. These don’t expire.

4

I’ll look into manual port forwarding and see if I can get that setup. While I look into that I have a question:

I have since returned home and have restarted my server and it still is giving me an indirect access connection. Wouldn’t restarting it cause the expired port to refresh? Or am I misunderstanding what you’re saying?

Either way, I’ll look into manual port forwarding, I just wanted some clarification.

5

It should, yes.
If it used to in the past, but doesn’t anymore, it could be caused by:

  • a router settings change (or firmware update) which disabled support for UPnP
  • your Internet access provider has put you behind a CG-NAT, which makes all port forwardings in your router useless. ISP’s increasingly try to do that even to existing customers, to free up the scarce IPv4 addresses. If this applies to you, you want to contact your ISP and ask them to revert the change. Some will do it, some will ask for an extra fee, some won’t at all.
6

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