OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit. Mobile OS: Android 6.x
This was driving me nuts at first but I finally figured out the source of the issue. Basically Plex is causing my PC to almost immediately wake up after going to Sleep mode. You can recreate the issue by installing the Plex mobile app on your phone > connect to your server > then try to put you r PC to sleep. You can consistently recreate the issue (at least I can). Confirmation obtained by terminating the Plex app on my phone > put computer to sleep > computer stays asleep. Note that launching the Plex app whilst computer is asleep does not cause the PC to wake up again IF you had previously terminated the Plex app on the phone prior to putting the computer to sleep. This suggests there’s a ‘heartbeat-like’ function that is hitting the PC’s NIC thus causing it to wake up.
Work around solution is to set network adapter to only wake up on reception of magic packet. I’m currently testing with modifying the “Away” mode setting in the Plex server.
Devs fix this please. Behavior **SHOULD **be like the following: PC stays asleep **UNTIL **user attempts to interact or deliberately presses a button on the Plex app on the phone. Obviously the heart-beat chain is broken if the above mentioned scenario occurs whereby the Plex app on mobile is launched before it has had a chance to initiate the heart-beat connection to the server but that will occur regardless.
For some reason I can’t edit my OP so further to my post: Changing the “Away” mode setting doesn’t have an affect. Devs, please put in a configurable setting so that users can change this behavior in either the desktop or mobile (ideally both) apps for Plex. It should be up to the user if they should give up the ability to put their computer to sleep!
Edit: Further testing reveals that if the user establishes a connection to the Plex server with the mobile app > terminates Plex on the server > goes back to mobile app and attempts to e.g. continue playing a media file > the server will wake up. So it looks like a patch is also required on the mobile app as well as the desktop software. Come on devs, its not that hard. A simple option in the options on the mobile app and the desktop software would solve this problem. Get it together.
If your NIC is NOT set to wake up by magic packet then this is expected behaviour, not just with Plex but with any application that sends tcp ip traffic as any packet that hits your NIC will wake it up. There isn’t anything to fix by the devs here.
Plex Server doesn’t support Wake on Lan so your best bet is to set it to only wake up by magic packet and use a WOL app on your phone to wake up the server.
Depending on your routers firmware you could also look at something like this:
@WilhelmStroker said:
If your NIC is NOT set to wake up by magic packet then this is expected behaviour, not just with Plex but with any application that sends tcp ip traffic as any packet that hits your NIC will wake it up. There isn’t anything to fix by the devs here.
Plex Server doesn’t support Wake on Lan so your best bet is to set it to only wake up by magic packet and use a WOL app on your phone to wake up the server.
Depending on your routers firmware you could also look at something like this:
Reddit - Dive into anything
I dissagree.
- This is only expected behaviour if your have software installed that is aimed at specifically working that way. I don’t and never have. Except now - Plex. Unbeknownst to me!
- There is definitely a dev fix required as this is counter intuitive to most people who probably aren’t used to seeing their PC’s inexplicabily wake themselves up. This is coming from someone who works in IT and has built countless systems and servers.
- As mentioned, setting my NIC to wake on magic packet was my work around to the situation.
I have several machines in my own home all networked and communicating with each other but will still respect sleep mode without issue. Its up to me to choose when a machine remotely wakes up via my router’s firmware or a WOL software solution. Plex tries to take this control away from the user and instead give the user symptoms of a malfuncitoning machine.
This is a failure in design. It should be up to the user to allow this behaviour rather than have to hunt down what random app is preventing their machine from staying in sleep mode. I’ve supported countless clients with many PC’s per client accross the country all installing whatever the hell they wanted and have never encountered this type of behaviour in all the various problems encountered. So this doesn’t appear to be common design from what i’ve seen. Which makes it even more obvious that Plex shouldn’t work in such a counter-intuitive manner.
It is not. The way you have your network card configured, ANY network packet can potentially wake up your machine, whether that’s coming from Plex or not. The fact that it is happening for Plex is a coincidence. Here is the Microsoft KB article that has more information:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/941145
Lol, IT is a disgustingly massive field at this point. Saying you work in IT is like saying you went to high school.
When your computer is asleep, Plex is effectively gone. It’s not running, it can do NOTHING. The functionality that wakes your PC up over the network is built into the NIC. When your computer is asleep, either you disable WOL, and nothing happens. You enable WOL and any connection wakes your computer, or you enable Magic Packet and then magic packets wake your computer. That’s it.
I imagine you are trying to use something like Wake on Directed Packet, but you don’t understand what it means and it doesn’t do what you think. All that means is any packet that references the machines MAC or IP will wake it up. Once again this happens before the computer wakes up and Plex has nothing to do with it. More often than not, whats actually waking your computer is your machine sending some sort of ARP packet or something similar. There is a reason WOL is disabled by default in windows. Because it requires work to implement.
The only way to do what you are trying to do would actually require another machine on your network that was functioning as a gateway for network traffic. If you engineered it correctly you could have it monitor for specific traffic and then fire a magic packet on demand. You could do it with something like a raspberry pi, but again, its not a SIMPLE task like you seem to think.
