What happens is that every 10 minutes Plex Media Server checks to see what your external WAN IP address is and binds to that address. In my case, I use a VPN for all traffic except certain services on my network, such as Plex, which I would like to route around my VPN and instead through my local ISP gateway. Although I can bind my PMS IP and Port successfully in MyPlex when the tunnel is down, it will go down again soon afterwards because my Public IP does not match any longer. This causes clients over the Internet to not be able to see any content on my server until I disconnect and reconnect PMS to MyPlex again.
I understand why the Plex dev team would add this functionality, because so many people either have dynamic IP addresses or do not properly understand what their public WAN IP address is. However, this causes a big problem for people like myself who have more advanced routing in place. I've searched the forums and there are a surprisingly large amount of people with this issue and request. I have done what the others have as a temporary work around, and that's to add an exception in the routing table so that requests going out to plex.tv and my.plexapp.com are routed through the local gateway. However, this is not very practical since the IP addresses change frequently due to Plex being hosted in the AWS cloud.
My suggestion and feature request is this :
Please add an Opt In / Out checkbox feature within PMS to enable/disable the scheduled checks to determine the server's public IP address. That, or allow the feature to specify the WAN IP address manually. Either one of these would resolve this issue.
Thanks for all that you do to make Plex the best software out there! :)
+1 struggling with the same issue over here. Basically I want to torrent content over a VPN, while share same server with family in another country. Static routes does not solve the issue correctly, and besides I'm only able to even do this in the first place because I am an IT security nerd. Must be made easier.
This is my only current issue with Plex and it is a frustrating one. I have a dynamic dns account that is reliably updated from my router and not impacted by vpn routing issues. So for me any one of being able to specify the address or a method to bind the application to an IP or NIC (I have two in my server machine) would be an option that would work for me.
I do use forcebindIP. However, while it works to bind the server and ensure it stays reliably available, all of the metadata agents fail when using it so new content is not indexed properly.
I've been banging my head against the wall trying to route Plex around my VPN....see the correct NAT messages to map where I want it, but Plex says NO (I suspect because it's not the same as my VPN WAN IP)
I used to get around it by manually connecting to plex/web through my router IP, but with the new plex/web update, I now cannot do that either. Please allow us to specify the server IP to use for myplex connections. I, also, encounter this due to VPN.
I did find a hacky way around this that seems to work decently for my situation, with a vpn connection that is causing the problem. Basically get myPlex to see your server normally, then block the ability for PMS to report into myPlex with a different IP. I have confirmed that even though it won't phone home to say it's still online, myPlex will continue to route to the known IP address.
Instructions:
Disconnect the VPN.
In Plex/Web edit the PMS settings and logout of then login to myPlex to get myPlex to see your ISP IP address.
Edit the hosts file to add an entry to block access to plex.tv
Now while I like your suggestion and I think this is something we need in PMS, you could also just fire up a VM and put your VPN + other apps in that and it will run isolated from the rest of your setup (a lot of benefits with this apphroach)
I agree we need this feature. In some parts of europe (for example germany) the ISPs are setting people up with non routable ipv4s with dualstack lite (ipv4 over ipv6, but no routable ipv4 adress) .
To circumvent this, I have created a openvpn connection to another site which has very fast internet and routable ips. The idea is for only services that need to be routed to go through the internet connections of the other site, and then down the vpn pipe. This works perfectly and I can go to http://routable_site_ip:32400 and see the webpage from the plex server of the non routable site.
I also have mobile devices however, and so it would be nice to be able to publish the plex server with routable site IP, instead of the non routable ip it is currently trying to use : )
So in conclusion, we need to be able to put in the ip we want to use manually :)
I did find a hacky way around this that seems to work decently for my situation, with a vpn connection that is causing the problem. Basically get myPlex to see your server normally, then block the ability for PMS to report into myPlex with a different IP. I have confirmed that even though it won't phone home to say it's still online, myPlex will continue to route to the known IP address.
Instructions:
Disconnect the VPN.
In Plex/Web edit the PMS settings and logout of then login to myPlex to get myPlex to see your ISP IP address.
Edit the hosts file to add an entry to block access to plex.tv
+1 just add support for vpn. So we can run our plex through vpn and not bypassing it. I would like to actually use my vpn for plex. Better security and protection
To be clear I have a solution that works well for me, but I'm thinking adding a manual IP or Domain name into PMS is ideal. My solution, since I've seen others looking for a temporary workaround, is to find the current IP for plex.tv, add that entry manually to your hosts file, and create a static route to bypass your VPN using that IP. I did this before creating this post and I've never had to change the IP in the hosts file or do anything extra.
This way when PMS tries to go out to plex.tv to report your WAN IP, it will take the route specified by the IP in your hosts file that is NOT through your VPN, reporting your correct WAN IP. I created this post because I wanted an easier solution for everyone but after seeing others looking for a workaround I thought I'd offer mine. :)
+1 to this post, have “VOted Up” / liked the original post… if you haven’t done that please do so to get the votes up there. This is an old request but there are a still a lot of queries about it in the forums recently so every Up-Vote counts!
