I’ve enable remote access and manually forwarded the ports on my router (at least I think I have, it’s a Hitron router and the fields aren’t exactly as described in the troubleshooting docs). Anyway, if I go into the Plex dashboard under Remote Accesss and it says not available, I click retry and it works. My friend is able to connect. But if I leave that page and come back, it says not available externally. Why?
Hard to tell… there can be tons of potential road bumps blocking your remote access.
I’m not familiar with those routers… if you found the configuration to establish a manual port forward, just make sure to set it up for a single public port and point that to a single private port. If your router configuration expects a range of ports… simply use the same port for both.
- You’re pretty much free to pick whatever public port you like (the related support article recommends a port between
20000and50000). - The private port must be
32400.
In addition to defining the port forward, you should configure the router to assign the same local IP to your Plex Media Server (IP reservation / static IP).
First steps of troubleshooting:
- confirm your Plex Media Server’s remote access settings match the port forward configuration in your router
- have you checked
Settings>[Server Name]>Remote Access>Manually specify public portand set it to the same public port you configured in your router? - also… does the public IP address displayed in the remote access settings match that showing in your router?
- have you checked
- Can you “see” the public port of your router from outside your home network (e.g. using a 3rd party online service like canyouseeme.org)?
Edit:
Found this guide on how to setup a port forward on Hitron routers.
