Plex new network behavior

General Discussions
1

Hi everyone,

I have a script that runs and will shutdown the plex server if the port 32400 is not established, ie no one is watching plex. However after a recent update I noticed the server never shut off. On further investigation I found the server was established on the loopback address 127.0.0.1 with port 32400.

TCP 127.0.0.1:64017 127.0.0.1:32400 ESTABLISHED
TCP 127.0.0.1:64018 127.0.0.1:32400 ESTABLISHED

Does anybody know why this is active at startup?
This is very annoying as now I have to remember to shut off the server :frowning:

2

Plex uses local connections to :32400 for quite a bit of internal communication between processes.

My first thought would be to update your script, using something like the python PlexAPI bindings, to identify if there are/aren’t clients connected.

What’s your script today? It would be more of a hack, but you could probably also ignore any connections from 127/8 -> 127/8.

3

I cannot recommend this approach. Plex needs to run permanently, to:

  1. be ready as soon as a local or a remote client is trying to access the server
  2. perform its “housecleaning duties” during the server maintenance period