Plex.tv public ip-adresses

General Discussions
1

Hi

How does the traffic between the client and the server work? My clients are in my home network (appletv, android, ios, etc,) and my server in in another country. I have split-tunneling VPN and is routing all traffic related to my server through the tunnel. But this does not cover app.plex.tv and other related traffic to plex. Is it some list or something of public adresses used by Plex? And is some traffic going throug Plex.tv public ip-adresses when watching a movie in som of the available plex apps?

2

Once the web app is loaded into your browser from there, there is no additional traffic.
It behaves the same as if you load the web app from your server.

plex.tv acts as a DynDNS provider and user authenticator for all plex users. Therefore all servers will contact plex.tv directly to publish their public IP.
All clients will contact plex.tv to get this list of the servers (only those for which they have been granted access).
On top of that, all servers will get a custom, pinned TLS certificate from plex.tv so the clients can communicate encrypted with the server(s). Servers also get a matching FQDN in the *.plex.direct domain.

There is also diagnostic data and use metrics reported to plex.tv

plex.tv is not a single server. It is a ‘cloud’ of servers, distributed across the globe in several data centres to keep the latency low. You can see that in the server log file when it is being started. It ‘pings’ several of these servers and determines the lowest round trip time.

Media traffic between your server and the clients is usually kept locally, unless there is no local route to the server (which can happen easily if you use a misconfigured VPN). In this case there is the public IP of the server used.
If the public IP is not reachable as well, there is the compromise of Plex relay.

3

Thanks for the good answer. So if i block all access to the server outside the tunnel and the tunnel went down, then the connection will still happen but through Plex Relay? Can I stop this somehow?

4

Plex Relay is only disabled by either:

  • disabling remote access in general under Settings - Server - Remote Access
  • disabling ‘secure connections’ under Settings - Server - Network (restart of plex server required)
Removing Devices not working
5

Yeah thanks. I dont want to do that. The server and the client is not on the same network.

I found an “incompatible” solution to rename Plex Relay file on the server. Tested it and this works, but may generate som errors maybe. But for now this will have to do. An request would be to implement an on/off switch for this in later versions.

6

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