Plex and PIA VPN - "Possible" / "Temporary" solution

General Discussions
1

Now this may be a complete coincidence, and is probably not a long term solution but I thought I’d post it anyways.
I was able to get remote access working on my PLEX server that is also running behind PIA VPN.
Background: My ISP provides a router that is crap and can’t go in bridge mode, so I installed my own router, and designated it as the DMZ from the ISP router. Then I designated my plex streaming server box as the DMZ from my router.

  1. Open plex, and turn on remote access on the server (without a VPN, things should work fine)
    (i don’t have a specific port specified, since it’s DMZ, it shouldn’t matter. I will click retry connection and wait until it shows the internet, connected to my public ip, then my private ip.)
  2. Connect to the VPN AFTER remote access has been turned on.

For whatever reason, I think doing it in this order creates the server based on your PRE-VPN IP address (your real IP address), so when someone goes to stream off of it, they connect to your public IP rather than your VPN IP.

This seems to continue to work UNTIL your house gets a new public IP, usually only after power outages in my case.

I don’t claim that this will work for everyone, but it’s what I do for now until I get around to either doing a VM or a dedicated machine as the plex server

2

Good Morning,

The way I fixed it is to used a DDNS server to register my REAL public IP , and I add the DDNS URL in Network -> Custom server access URLS. With that setup I can acces my Plex server anytime even over a VPN and even when my plublic IP change, but be aware at the moment I see that the public IP in remote access is the VPN one, NO plex application running on the local network have access to PLEX server (linux box even if plex server is on it and trying to acces it from 127.0.0.1, ,Android device,LG os TV). but for me it’s not a problem because most of the time I’m using Kodi for streaming at home !

HTH,

Sylvain