Plex dual NICs

[fragmaster007]

I have a question. I have a dell poweredge server as my plex server. It has dual NICs. I have one nic directly connected to my ONT and the other nic is connected to my 24 port network switch. I have changed the plex network interface to the nic thats directly connected to my ONT and its still disconnecting. After some research it looks like that setting is for local connections only. Is there a way to tell plex to use the nic connected to my ONT directly for remote connections? I mean why would there be a setting for local and not remote connections. obviously you had 2+ nics in mind when creating that setting

Since plex is now notorious for remote connections dropping I feel there should be a setting to allow plex to use a specific nic for remote connections for those of us who have 2+ nics in our rigs. This is starting to become more popular among plex users I am seeing. Plex devs, can you please either fix the random remote disconnections issue or please add an option for us to choose which nic to use for remote connections.

[pshanew]

You can’t tell Plex to use a particular interface for its remote connection; however, you can force the issue by configuring the desired interface to have a lower (and thus higher priority) interface metric.

You can see which interface currently has a lower metric by issuing Get-NetIPInterface in PowerShell. To set an interface’s metric, use:
Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex x -InterfaceMetric y

Use the ifIndex value returned from Get-NetIPInterface and provide a lower interface metric for the preferred interface than the non-preferred one.

This will only work if the two interfaces ultimately have different public IP addresses. The reason is that the above sets the priority for outbound traffic when all other routing criteria are equal. The choice of interface for outbound traffic matters because it determines what Plex sees as your public IP address, to which inbound traffic should be routed.

Note: The above affects all egress traffic from the server, not just Plex Media Server. There are ways around this using routing table configuration.

[fragmaster007]

1. not sure where to enter those commands
2. Im on windows, not sure if those commands are linux or windows
3. my nics are not teamed, so nic1 has IP address via DCHP from the router and nic2 has a public ip address from the ONT
4. I dont want to force the connections through 1 nic, I wanted 1 nic for intranet and 1 nic for external connections for plex
5. is it normal for the red error icon next to “remote connects” to appear and when I click on remote connections is disappears and remote connect is restored. I removed the cat6 cable from the nic going to my router so its only the cat6 from the ont going to the server and its still disconnecting. Its starting to piss me off… I know I am not the only person having this issue. Its not a networking issue since I am not connected to the router or my network switch. I am starting to think its a plex issue. When I had a readynas I had plex running on it just fine, no disconnections what so ever, however when I moved to a dell poweredge server is when all this manifested.

[pshanew]

With regard to 1 and 2, these commands are for Windows, to be entered via PowerShell.

With regard to 4, this shouldn’t affect your local network traffic as Windows will already have configured more specific routes for that traffic. This will only affect traffic for which there are multiple, otherwise equal, routes; the interface metric is the tie-breaker.

With regard to 5, I wouldn’t necessarily call it normal. It is however a fairly common abnormal condition. And it may or may not be a network issue. But more often than not when there are problems with remote access, it is a network issue.

If you’re able, give the above suggestion a shot. You can always undo it later. Here’s concrete example. This is the output of Get-NetIPInterface from one of my Windows 10 VMs:

If I wanted my “Bluetooth Network Connection” interface with ifIndex 18 to be prioritized above my “Ethernet0” interface with ifIndex 7, I would run something like:
Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceIndex 18 -InterfaceMetric 20

[fragmaster007]

@pshanew

a

thanks for the info, I’ll give that a try right now. Just in the event I need or want to undo it how would I go about that?

[pshanew]

Just note what the original interface metric is before you change it; if you want to undo it, set it back.

[fragmaster007]

I hope I did this right.

[pshanew]

If it was your intent to have Ethernet 2 have a higher priority than your other interfaces then yep, you did it correctly .

[fragmaster007]

perfect, thanks for the help. Now that I adjusted the priority it should use the nic connected to my ONT vs my router thus hopefully stopping the remote disconnects. Thanks again!