Currently Plex determines its own IP address for remote access automatically. Many users with e.g. several IP addresses or more sophisticated networks would like to use their:
self-defined IP address
or a DDNS address.
This is a standard feature of every router and NAS out there. Why IP addresses and DDNS data can’t be chosen manually also in Plex?
In my case, Plex is hosted on a QNAP NAS which is connected to the internet through a VPN (in the NAS, not in the router, as I also need some services without VPN) - naturally, with ever changing IP addresses. Plex is automatically only suggesting the VPN IP address currently used for a remote connection. Hence Plex and Plexamp can’t be accessed, from outside
Sorry, but this is a network problem, not a media center problem.
You can tell Plex in which interface it should listen for requests. Settings → Network → Preferred network interface. Now, the valid IP in which your LAN IP will be translated to is your router’s WAN IP, or in case you have multiples, the one you chose in your NAT configuration.
The idea of VPN is to have a private connection in a public environment (internet), and routing all the traffic into the tunnel is an intrinsic characteristic of a VPN connection.
The split-tunneling thing offered by some VPN providers is the feature you’re looking for, but if I may, you only need to use VPN for torreting, not for Plex, unless you wanna have daily headaches.
A Custom server access URLcan be specified in Plex, if you have one.
But @CostaHT’s point is what matters: even if you get inbound traffic, outbound traffic will take the VPN route, and it won’t accomplish the goal.
I strongly agree with the suggestion. Don’t try to exclude Plex traffic from a VPN. Instead, run Plex independently of the “needs VPN” traffic. Move the other software to a docker instance, virtual machine, or other physical server, and put the VPN in that.
Hi, I have a different use case for the same request.
I currently run 2 plex media servers on the same network. Each server has it’s own public url: plex1.xxx.com:443 & plex2.xxx.com:443
When I enable remote access, plex uses the external-ip:port instead of the url:port
Since both servers have the same visible external IP, plex confuses and redirects both urls to the same server.
Settinng the PMS url in the networking page does not help.
Thanks for the replies but I’m sorry this doesn’t work. The whole point is to have the NAS on a VPN to have protected remote access to it - hence the internet access of the NAS goes through VPN. So if I follow your recommended path of only having certain apps on my NAS go through VPN (if it was even possible to set that up) then the NAS itself would have to be exposed to www without VPN - not good. In fact I’m under ongoing bombardment by Chinese hackers trying to login every 5 secs or so - so I don’t want to risk anything… It’s probably possible to add exceptions in QNAP - but not through a standard menu and for an average user like me (I don’t do SSH commands much).
Split tunnelling only works with the apps of my VPN provider (PureVPN) under Windows, Mac, Linux where it can be enabled/disabled for the respective machine that is running the app. As there is no app for QNAP: you guessed it - no split tunnelling there.
If I enter my WAN IP address in the Plex network settings I’m still not getting access as you said in your replies.
Further comment: I believe most users operating a QNAP / Synology Disk station with Plex will just do so without VPN, anyway - otherwise all of them might have the same problem…
Because all URLs will translate to an IP. Network equipment communicate with each other using IP or MAC, and a URL is just a human friendly name so you don’t have to memorize the IP of the websites you want to visit.
What you’re trying to do with your modem it’s technically impossible, and a load balancing solution would give you different results too.
Hi CostaHT, if plex requests the correct url (not ip), the reverse proxy will route the requests to the corresponding server. I think this is a useful feaure request.
Yes, but then your have to simply create one port redirect to your reverse proxy and let it decide what device it will direct the traffic to based on the http header.
When Remote Access is enabled, Plex performs external-ip discovery and registers that discovered IP with the Plex Cloud.
When a Custom server access URL is configured, Plex will register the specified address(es) with the Plex Cloud.
If external-ip discovery isn’t wanted, then disable Remote Access. Plex will still register any Custom server access URLs when Remote Access is disabled.
As @CostaHT says, when using a Custom server access URL, other components must be present to deliver the traffic to Plex.
Something else I just noticed. The screenshot shows an invalid configuration for List of IP addresses and networks that are allowed without auth, which Plex will ignore.
The Server’s access URLs don’t belong in that field. For local addresses or networks to have access without auth, they must be entered as “address” or “address,network/mask” without any extra characters (even spaces!).
