I have been experiencing an interesting issue. About once every other month my Internet router needs restarted. This is fine and not the issue, well not directly. When I do this the connection from Plex servers at my home to the internet become unavailable. I understand why this happens. The UPnP configuration is lost when my main modem / router is rebooted. I fix it by going to each play server and removing the manual port configuration from remote connection disable remote connection then re-enable, telling it to reestablish connection. It goes and configures what it needs to on the router and then I go to the router and look at the port it tried to configure. Then once I have the port I put that in the manual configuration port information, I do this because the port it says it is using on the Plex interface and the port the router is configured for is always different. I got used to this and just do the manual configuration of flex ports. At this point the hosts are available again and Plex is serviceable outside of my network. Everything is happy.
At least until today.
Today I did this normal process for myself and things are accessible, however both my servers are indicating as indirect. Yet if I go to the external IP address and port that is configured for my flex server on my browser or application it works directly. I have now done this process three times. Over the last 6 hours. Nothing on the plex.tv application is changing. I can see nothing I have done wrong. I can’t figure out why the web application is insisting on indirect connections, when I can make direct ones.
Any Ideas?
Now before you ask, if I leave the connection as it is determine the port on its own the port Plex says it is using and the port that is configured on the router is wrong. If I use port forwarding instead of UPnP configuration my router from Centrylink for my fiber 1GB connection will say that when I go to configure the second connection for the other flex that it is already in use. If I try a combination, the router will configure the port forwarding on one and the second will fail with UPnP or vice versa. This has been working for 6 months, since I moved in to this home, and setup the second server.
I had to setup the second server due to the number of people I have accessing my setup. I primary host for TV is a Mac mini. It couldn’t handle the transcoding and bandwidth for both movies and tv so I decided the load I got a PR4100 max disk space and load movies to it. It handles the transcoding for movies and the Mac min for tv shows.
I list all this additional information so that everyone understand that I don’t need other problems that are evident in this post solved, I have hardware limitations but they have nothing to do with routing issues, I can’t change my router it is the required router for my connection.
