Issue opening https://plex.tv without www - media server won't work

Plex Media Server
1

Server Version#: 1.40.2.8395-c67dce28e (MacOS)

Hello,

I’ve been running Plex Media Server with a Plex Pass since 2012 on a Late 2012 Mac Mini with Catalina without any issues.

I noticed this week I lost access to my server.
I tried to claim it, but it didn’t work. I logged out, logged in, did every step I found in the support articles, nothing worked.

Checked the network calls while trying to claim the server, and found out that the claim link was throwing a 500 error.

Checked the logs, and found out that several Plex links, including the claim link were throwing an error 60 regarding an SSL issue with plex.tv
So did a quick test on the browser, and https://www.plex.tv works fine, but if I insert https://plex.tv I get a certificate error. I bypass the error, and the link is not redirected to www.plex.tv and goes to a not found page.

Did the same test on a more recent Mac with Sonoma, and https://plex.tv gets correctly redirected to https://www.plex.tv.

So all Plex functionalities are not working correctly on the Media Server anymore, because https://plex.tv is not working on my Mac.

I’ve read a lot about issues with expired certificates, but I couldn’t find anything on my Mac, and since the Mac is quite old and has a lot of garbage accumulated with several programs and VPNs I decided to format the Mac and do a Catalina clean install (this Mac version can’t upgrade to newer versions of MacOS), but after all that, the issue persists.

So I’m not sure what else to do here, since Plex doesn’t work at all with this URL issue.
Any suggestions?

Thanks!

2

Are you using pi-hole or any other non-default DNS resolvers? Are you trying to enforce “Secure DNS”?
Which version of MacOS are you using?

If you can, please quote the full DNS error(s) that is thrown.

4

Please do also share the output of (sent in a terminal window)
nslookup plex.tv
as well as
nslookup www.plex.tv

5

Hi,

I’m using Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7.
As mentioned I formatted the computer and installed a clean version of the OS and didn’t do any changes to the System settings, I only installed Plex Media Server and Chrome.
And I’m having the same issue on Safari and Chrome.

Screenshot 2024-05-11 at 11.22.54
Screenshot 2024-05-11 at 11.22.54755×662 39.9 KB

Meanwhile I remembered to add Google DNS Servers as a test, and now everything seems to be working again.

I was able to load Media Server and add Libraries (since I lost the other server I add to remove it and create a new one all over again).

Here is the nslookup output with and without the Google DNS Servers.

Screenshot 2024-05-11 at 11.52.00
Screenshot 2024-05-11 at 11.52.00436×613 17.2 KB

So I guess that I can work with this, but I’m confused, is this an issue with my ISP?

Thanks!

6

All Plex services are hosted in datacenters and behind load balancers. Which means that the IP adresses of the actual server machines are changing often.

DNS servers must not be caching their IP tables for too long.
(actually there is a flag “time-to-live” from the root DNS server’s answer, which tells the querying DNS server for how long the answer can be cached.)

Apparently, the DNS server of your ISP (or whatever you have been using before switching to 8.8.8.8) has been caching for too long, causing its answers to be incorrect/outdated.
So you might want to stay with 8.8.8.8 as your primary DNS server.

7

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