Plex without Internet access?

[sa2000]

@Nixellion

My server is in a private network, default 192.168.1.x. I believe that’s considered to be private network? It’s all connected to the same router, and I could not access it even from localhost. You can’t get more private than localhost

I’ll make sure to keep this documentation at hand for whenever I lose internet connection again.

WAN IP must always authenticate

I’m not sure what you mean by this, as if you don’t have internet access, there’s no WAN. Consider use case of a remote country house with no internet connection whatsoever, or maybe a maximum of an 2G\EDGE grade and very unstable connection, which can go out for days or weeks.

That is fine - if your local network is on 192.168.1.x subnet then that is private network. But if you had defined a local subnet as being for example 50.20.12.x then the server local IP address would be a WAN IP and would need authentication and internet access

@Nixellion

I could not access it even from localhost

If the server is claimed already and signed in to plex.tv then access via localhost must authenticate and plex.tv access is needed to authenticate. What I do on my holiday home is use my iPhone as hotspot and get the server to access the internet via the hotspot (in fact i have a client router for the local network and it is the client router that connects to my temporary hotspot) and can then get to server settings and sign it out of plex.tv. Once server is signed out, you no longer need the hotspot. The alternative is to delete the settings keys i mentioned.

[Nixellion]

@sa2000

If the server is claimed already and signed in to plex.tv then access via localhost must authenticate and plex.tv access is needed to authenticate. What I do on my holiday home is use my iPhone as hotspot and get the server to access the internet via the hotspot (in fact i have a client router for the local network and it is the client router that connects to my temporary hotspot) and can then get to server settings and sign it out of plex.tv. Once server is signed out, you no longer need the hotspot. The alternative is to delete the settings keys i mentioned.

Well, our holiday home is much further away from civilization, as I said, there’s no stable internet there. At all. There are still a lot of places on earth where you can’t even get decent 2G connection, let alone 3G or 4G. And often there’s no 2G, 3G or 4G signal available in the area at all, depending on weather conditions and cell tower load and I don’t know what else. The fact is - weeks without any kind of internet. It’s good, nature and all, but it’d be nice to watch a movie now and then.

My family also uses unlimited internet plans on our phones, but one downside of it is that you can’t use it as a hotspot anyway, operator blocks it.

Is it required to claim the server for any features to work?

I’d like to propose a possible solution to simplify this process. If server detects that there’s no internet, and that you’re connecting from LAN - give user an option to automatically comment-out or turn off those settings, instead of requiring us to edit those manually on the server. Would it be hard to implement?

[sa2000]

@Nixellion

give user an option to automatically comment-out or turn off those settings, instead of requiring us to edit those manually on the server. Would it be hard to implement

That would bypass security and if you allow it then, there might as well not be any authentication on local network or localhost - but the decision was taken that there would be.

[TeknoJunky]

@Nixellion

If adding your local lan (or the private ips of your plex clients) in the plex server settings and allowing insecure connections doesn’t work for you, you may need a different solution.

essentially the plex team has consciously decided to require online authentication, both for security and no doubt to manage the plex pass features, and to monetize the user base via the recent news and web shows additions (and probably even more future related ‘features’).

It has gotten difficult to use plex server in a completely offline manner.

There is no ‘offline’ mode for the server (like there is for clients).

That is on purpose.

For your use case, a remote/vacation/country home without consistent (or any) internet access, I would simply suggestion you pursue a different solution, perhaps such as Kodi, which doesn’t require any online authentication to function.

Of course, because kodi is a ‘thick’ client, it may take more resources for playback than having a separate plex server and using a plex client for smart tv or appletv or whatever.

But with kodi you can have multiple user profiles which will allow for different people’s watching where they left off.

There are also other alternatives out there, which may or may not be suited to your particular situation.