Plex Media Server on Windows Server 2016 - Can't connect to server from computers on same network

General Discussions
1

I installed PMS on a Windows Server 2016 server, and set up the necessary libraries and made the necessary configurations for the firewall on the server, but I am running into problems connecting to the Plex Media Server from the web app on different computers. Each computer I am using to try and access the Plex Media Server via the Plex WebApp says “The Server is unavailable”. I have followed the Plex KB articles and verified that the computers I am using to connect to the Plex server are on the same subnet and network as the Windows Server.

The only way I have been able to get computers to access the server is through manually setting the 32400 port as a public port and allowing remote access. Even then, when I do so a pop up appears and says "Unable to make a secure (direct) connection, and connects via an indirect connection.

I contacted my organizations network and server ops teams to see if they could help and they told me that if the computers are on the same network, same vlan, and same IP subnet there’s no restriction for ports or connectivity. They also mentioned that Zone based firewall is not running on our router, and that there are no ACLs configured on the distribution switch or on the router that would restrict connectivity. Yet this is still an issue.

Does anyone have any idea what could be happening?

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Could be an issue with DNS rebinding protection or DNS in general.
Ask your network people for an exemption for subdomains of *.plex.direct

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Thanks. I will give this a try.

I’m curious to see why this works because before we were just running Plex Media Server on desktops and called them our “Media Servers”. We then decided to upgrade to full on Rack servers, HP ProLiant Dl180 g6, so that it would handle our multiple concurrent streams. When we were running it on our desktop “servers” we were able to connect just fine, but as soon as we tried to switch over to these new Windows Server 2016 servers, we started to run into this error.

Based on this it makes me a little less confident that it is a DNS issue considering it was working before we moved to the upgraded servers.

4

@provomtc said:
Based on this it makes me a little less confident that it is a DNS issue considering it was working before we moved to the upgraded servers.

Secure Connections were introduced relatively recently.
Maybe your other Plex installations used an older software release?

You can conduct a test and disable ‘Secure Connections’ globally. See how it goes.