tl;dr Plex seems to have starting disabling remote access for clients who can get through my firewall simply because plex.tv servers cannot.
Server Version 1.14.1.5488:
I run PMS via the plexinc/pms-docker:plexpass docker container. My perimeter firewall restricts access to a list of specific source IP addresses. This list doesn’t include the plex.tv server farm (because I have no idea of their addresses) but that never used to be a problem.
I updated from version 1.12.3.4973 to 1.14.1.5488. Subsequently each remote client lost the ability to connect directly and switched to indirect. The only fix I found was to temporarily open the firewall to all source IP addresses and tell PMS to retry remote access. I got a green tick and remote clients regained direct access.
Clients have so far retained access even after I restricted access through the firewall to my original list of IP addresses again (causing PMS to go back to a red exclamation point). This was a couple of days ago.
Can anyone explain why I had to do this and if this is something which is likely to happen periodically now?
I don’t mind so much having to manage this after an update but it’s going to be frustrating if this starts happening randomly.
Have you restarted the server and/or the firewall since re-applying the rule? It might be as simple as an existing state that sill allows traffic to pass. In that case, your server would still be able to communicate with plex.tv despite the firewall rule restricting incoming connections.
Also, plex.tv appears to be hosted on AWS. So in order for everything to work properly in the long run, you might either need to allow any incoming connections from AWS or you need to figure out what specific servers need to able to connect to you and allow those IPs to connect in.
Thanks for the reply. The firewall was inadvertently restarted yesterday so there shouldn’t be any existing state muddling me up though I admit I didn’t consider that.
I originally set the server up 18 months ago and the firewall was restricted from day one. So plex.tv never could access my server directly but remote clients would attempt to connect directly and it worked for them. And this continued to work until I updated the other day.
It feels as though there was some sort of state communicated with clients to say “hey, plex.tv can’t talk to that server so you can’t connect directly, don’t bother trying.”
I might be talking broken biscuits but I’m wondering if that was a deliberate change introduced. I’ve tried searching the forum but can’t find any mention of such. I suppose I might have to open up incoming connections to AWS but it feels like doing so should be an unnecessary risk.
This one is bugging me too Ive wasted nearly 2 days trying to sort this and getting pretty p off with it, nothing on my system has changed no updates it just stopped working from outside my network, also inside, its like when remote is enabled my local clients cant connect as they then try outside the network as if the server is not available, then if I try and access a file it will run then when I check the settings again remote access is still enabled but not available outside my network and then no clients can connect until I reset the connection again (all firewalls off during testing!)
My post is here for my logs it seems as if the remote access service is toggling on and off between the internal and external, I just dont get it I used it over Xmas with no issues!
@Pjbracer1 Please open a new thread for your issue(s). It really hampers the readability once you start discussing several different issues in one thread.
My logs indicate PMS failed when it last attempted a reachability check (two hours ago) however the connections list at https://plex.tv/api/resources still includes my WAN address. Which is good from my perspective.
I shall be careful to check this again before and after doing the next software update.
