Losing connection whilst away from home

Plex Media Server Remote Access
1

Server Version#: 1.43.0.10492-121068a07
Player Version#: Plexamp 4.12.4
<If providing server logs please do NOT turn on verbose logging, only debug logging should be enabled>

I wonder if anyone can help me troubleshoot this? I don’t really know where to start.

Firstly, my set-up… I have a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro (running Sequoia 15.7.3) which is home to my Plex Media Server. I have an 18TB Western Digital external hard drive which contains all the music. I use Firefox to view my library.

We recently went away for 10 days.

This time, before we left, I made sure to quit everything on my computer that would use the internet connection, so as to avoid any congestion. (This included quitting Firefox as I didn’t need to see the library & I have a whole load of other tabs open that I need to stay open for the time being.) The only thing left running on my Mac was Plex Media Server.

As usual, I queued up a bunch of albums in Plexamp & off we went with music playing. Half way through our 4 hour drive, we stopped for a break. I unplugged my phone from the cable in the car & off we went. Upon returning to the car, I plugged the phone in again & hit the play button, only to have Plexamp refuse to continue playing. In fact, I couldn’t do anything. Plexamp had lost the connection to my computer at home.

Note: Even if I’d lost the connection, I would - at the very least - have expected there to be music in the buffer that would play out before playback stopped.

For the remainder of our journey, the whole of the time away & the return journey, I had no access to my library. (Fortunately, my wife has Apple Music so we were able to play music in the car.)

There are two things I can mention that may tick a couple of boxes…

Firstly, upon returning home, I went up to my office & touched the trackpad of the laptop. Even though I use a fingerprint to unlock it most of the time, every few days Macs will ask for the password. (It’s a security thing. I’m not a fan but I can’t disable it.) So, there it was asking for the password. I had the presence of mind to open Plexamp on my phone & see if I could play anything. (I’d long been suspicious that if the Mac went into lockdown like this while I was away from home, it may be the cause of the occasional loss of connectivity I’d experienced.)

It was fine. Now that I was back on the same wifi network in my house, Plexamp started playing immediately.

So that rules out the need to enter a password as the cause of the problem.

It also shows that everything was basically working fine the whole time. Nothing had crashed, the hard drive hadn’t unmounted itself. It just worked again as soon as I was home.

Secondly, having recently changed internet providers (from Sky to Virgin Media) I notice that Remote Access has a red exclamation mark next to it. However, upon reading the accompanying notes, I don’t get the impression that my loss of music would be affected by this. It appears to be for browsing my network remotely & only referring to video. (Of course, if I’m wrong about that, it might be the immediate culprit!)

Having said that, playback stopped occasionally when I was on Sky, so I don’t suppose that’s the issue, regardless.

Can anyone help me troubleshoot this? I don’t really know where to start but it’s super annoying.

If the wifi connection at home is lost & the router resets itself & wifi is restored, could that cause this? Would I get a new DHCP lease or something else that Plex wouldn’t know about?

2

I must say, the quality of support on this site is amazing.

I am truly… Whelmed.

3

The red on the remote access page would make it so you can’t access your server remotely, especially if you have plex relay disabled.

Plex relay sends your data through the plex servers and is limited to 1Mbps or 2Mbps with a plex pass. This is a setting in your Plex network settings.

Music doesn’t require a plex pass to access remotely, so you can use either relay or the full remote access method. Ideally the full method with port forwarding to make use of full bandwidth.

Any chance you’re on Virgin in Canada? I know recently some areas in Canada on Virgin were moved to CGNAT which does not allow for port forwarding, which is what the plex remote access page is used for.

Do you just have one router/gateway on your network? Multiple will create issues if not configured properly.

To confirm if you’re CGNAT or not, go into your router and check the WAN ip. Does it fall between 100.64.0.0 - 100.127.255.255? If it’s not between that, does it match the ip you see here: https://whatsmyip.com ? It should.

If all of that checks out, you can click the manually specify port on the plex remote access page, and enter a random port. Don’t use 32400, pick something else, up to 65535. Once you do that, go back to your router and create a port forward rule. You take external requests to the port you entered, and send it to your server ip and internal port 32400 (it will always be 32400 for internal). Once that’s created, test that it’s open: https://canyouseeme.org

You should also set a static ip for your server in the router so that if the router resets or loses power, the ip won’t change making your forwarding rule no longer valid.

Once those steps are followed, the remote access should show green on the plex status page and stay green.

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Thank you so much. I only understand half of that & have no idea how to access my Virgin Media router, but I shall work my way through your comments & see if I can figure it out. I really appreciate the time it took to reply. Someone like me is completely lost as soon as things just stop working, seemingly for no reason. I’m in the UK, by the way. North Wales to be precise.

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I think so. I only have one Virgin Media router connected to the outside world. I have several of those boxes they give you to extend your network through the house but only one way in & out.

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So I do need a green light in the settings to get a really good remote signal? Right! I was confused about that. I got the impression, from the help files I found, that it was only relevant to movies, not music.

7

I get that it can be frustrating, especially when you’re away from home and it just stops working!

Gonna be in and out the rest of the afternoon, so may not be able to respond, hopefully others can chime in as you work through the steps, but to answer so far…

The extenders shouldn’t be a problem as long as they aren’t creating additional networks. Is your server plugged into the main router? If so, should be OK.

When you say “green light on the car”, what does that mean? To access Plex remotely you either need to enable Plex Relay in the network settings, but as noted that is bandwidth limited, or you need to setup the full remote access. When full remote access is setup, the Plex Remote Access page will show in green “Fully accessible outside your network”. They are completely separate, so relay should work without full remote access setup.

For remote access for Movies/TV, you do need a Plex Pass or Remote Watch Pass for remote access, but this is not required for basic music streaming. It remains free, but you do need one of the options mentioned above setup/enabled.

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Apologies, I don’t know why I wrote “on the car”. Total brain fart. I meant to confirm that I do need to get a green light in the settings to get it working in the car properly. I think my thoughts just tripped over one another while I was typing.

But…

“They are completely separate, so relay should work without full remote access setup.”

Surely if relay was working, I wouldn’t have completely lost contact with the server when I was a couple of hours from home.

I will certainly go through the steps you suggest, but I’m still suspicious that it’s all Virgin Media’s fault. lol

9

Did you confirm relay is enabled on your server in the settings? This would need to be checked:

IMG_6851
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If it is, it may be your ISP having issues, but best to get everything else setup and can rule out things you can control.

Your Virgin router and Plex may be using UPnP, which automatically does the forwarding piece, but UPnP can close the port as well, so it may work for a little when active, and then the router closes it. Lots of guessing…

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I can confirm that the Enable Relay button is checked.

11

Well, this clearly isn’t going to be as straightforward as I’d hoped.

Firstly, I can’t find my WAN IP address anywhere in the router settings. I’ve looked in every pane. I have a screenshot of the Admin page & there’s a section called WAN IP Settings but it doesn’t contain anything that looks like an IP adress. There’s an IPv4 address, but that not the same thing, is it?

On the Plex settings page, the public IP matches the result from the “whatsmyip” link but I can’t find anything within the router settings itself.

So, I can’t check if it falls within the range you specify.

UPnP is enabled, if that means anything?

There is a port forwarding section, which might imply that I can at least configure port forwarding.

Unfortunately, I’ve tried every combination of settings I can & I just cannot get it working. The “canyouseeme” link verifies that I cannot be seen.

It’ll be something very simple of course. Something that anyone who understands this stuff would be able to fix a moment.

Very frustrating.

I wonder if the port forwarding rule I’ve created takes time to “propagate”? I recall that when I was setting up DNS servers with my ISP it took a while for them to get fully connected around the world, but I have no idea if that applies here.

Also, I have a VPN. Not sure if that needs anything.

Also, the firewall in the router is ON. Again, I don’t know if that’s relevant.

Plus, I’m changing these settings within the server on my MacBook, but I’m trying to access my library from Plexamp on my iPhone. Do I need to mess with anything in the app?

12

I was helping someone with Virgin in Canada a few weeks back and he had the same issue, couldn’t find the wan ip. Is the ipv4 something like 10.x.x.x? If you’re comfortable sharing it, share the screenshot. If it’s your actual public ip, I’ll tell you to delete it.

The public ip on the plex page won’t give us the right info, it’s doing the same thing the whatsmyip site does, so those will always match.

Disable UPnP. Since it was enabled and you didn’t do the manual forwarding before, it’s likely been using that. Which can cause the problems you’ve experienced.

The forwarding rule should be instant. Can you screenshot the plex remote access page and the router port forward page?

Your VPN should be off for this. You can look into split tunneling, but without that, it will interfere with plex remote accsss since your vpn may block/interfere with plex remotely.

No changes to make in the apps.

13

Okay, so I tried a couple of combinations &, having set up the port forwarding rule, it turns out it’s the VPN that’s messing everything up. Even with UPnP switched on again, I get a solid green light.

So I guess I now have to figure out how to tell Nord VPN to allow traffic through the selected port?

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Nord doesn’t support port forwarding through their vpn. You’ll have to look into how to exclude plex from the vpn, this is split tunneling. You mention you’re on a Mac, just note that I’ve seen many folks comment on that functionality not always working great on the Mac, also on other platforms as well.

15

Thanks so much for your help on this.

I used to use Malwarebytes & I can’t remember why I changed. I’ll look into whether or not they support it.

Failing that, I’ll just leave the VPN off when I need to.

16

I use Proton but I don’t use the split tunneling. It does support port forwarding.

There was a thread a couple days back on Reddit with a few different options that support the split tunneling properly. On Mac, PIA and Surfshark seems to work, so does Proton.

Once you get the split tunneling working, no need to forward plex through the vpn, forwarding through your router is enough.

17

I’m gonna give Proton a go, as I already use them for one of my email addresses.

Funny thing is, I switched on port forwarding on Proton & it shows a port number which is, of course, not the same as the port number I set up earlier, but Plex still shows a green light.

It shouldn’t do that, should it, now that I have Proton VPN installed & running?

18

VPN can cause false positive for the connection being valid, it may take time for it to switch to red. Or maybe proton split tunnels the plex app automatically? I’ve never used it. Only way to know for sure is to connect remotely and test to see if it’s working. You also should disable relay so you know for sure how you’re connecting.

If you’re going to port forward through proton, your router port forward won’t matter since your connection is now behind the vpn. But again, they can behave strangely, so it’s trial and error to figure out the best setup.

19

Thanks. I’ve just driven to the station & back to pick up my wife (about half an hour all round) & it was perfect, like it used to be. But I have the buffer set so high, that it could just have been using that. I guess I probably won’t know until I do a longer drive. Next time I go out, I’ll switch off the relay function, just to check it.

20

Going back to one detail in my OP - with everything I’ve learned since - that still confuses me… When we were two hours into our drive & we stopped for coffee, I unplugged my phone from the cable that connects it to the auxiliary on my car stereo & toook it in with me. It had played perfectly up until that point. When we got back to the car & I plugged it in again, that’s when I suddenly got nothing. No response at all. (Well, I would press play & the arrow would turn into a pause symbol for a few moments & then revert to an arrow.) I’m confused as to why it wouldn’t just play out what was in the buffer before stopping.

I mean, the chances of the buffer running out just as I unplugged it must be virtually zero, so…