One user can't play anything

General Discussions
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1

For some strange reason, one of the users in our Plex Home can no longer play anything on our server. This persists across devices and apps/browsers. I even tried switching to the affected user and confirmed the following behavior:

  • iOS: None of the photos (like movie posters, etc.) load on the main screen. Upon pressing play on one of the items, the playback screen comes up, but the media does not play, and an error message is generated: “Couldn’t retrieve the play queue for this item.”
  • Web: The photos (movie posters, etc.) do show up. Upon pressing play on any item, the loading indicator shows for a few seconds, before Plex shows a network error, with the error code being either S1001 or S1002.

To be clear, all other users can play things just fine and have reported zero issues. I have asked users to test playback and they have confirmed that it works on their account and their devices. Only one Plex Home user with their own specific Plex account is affected.

I have logs available for the iOS client but would prefer to DM it to a Plex employee.

2

Figured it out. I had a WAF running in front of Plex and it had a bug that silently dropped connections without logging them.

3

would you mind sharing what WAF you’re using and what rule got triggered?

4

I was using Coraza WAF in front of Caddy. I’m not sure which rule it triggered but I was using the OWASP ruleset along with the recommended ones in the Coraza repository.

If the content had Korean characters, then Coraza wouldn’t let the request through. This wasn’t a problem for accessing the server, since none of the usernames and what not had Korean characters, but Korean content refused to play.

I’m not sure whether Coraza would’ve blocked other non-English characters, nor do I care enough to check, as I switched away entirely from Coraza and Caddy after a lot of problems like these.