Remote Access

General Discussions
21

@ChuckPA said:
Here’s what we know and are trying to figure out WHY.

  1. Depending on operating system, if you use a manual port setting and/or your modem/router doesn’t respond to UPnP / NAT-PMP, You’re hosed. Nothing can be done at this time.
  2. Almost regardless of operating system, when you come through the first time setup, you’re golden. don’t muck with it and remote will work.

As an engineer, that’s a race condition. The $50,000,000,000,000,000,000 question is… “Where?” Why do those two conditions work and others fail. We can walk through the damn code by hand account for the timing. But the weird part? It’s not timing. It’s very specific sequence of events. The code is designed to take this into account.

If you’re familiar with a Finite State Machine and State Transition Diagrams. The whole remote access access mechanism has one. It always follows it. Programmers call it a flow chart. So why doesn’t it always work for everyone? Everyone has a different router and ISP but the one thing they ALL have in common… a different path to the Plex.tv servers which handle it. So why would a state machine fail? That’s the mystery. It’s a Send “Can you see me?” request - Get Reply - Send current status to confirm - Get reply - Post my current IP - Get confirmation. Now what can go wrong with that?

Possible answers? If you have IPv6 enabled on the computer and your ISP doesn’t play well? (like AT&T is known NOT to play well), that causes problems with metadata alone.

So here’s what I’ve been doing and has had the best results.

  1. Stop PMS, Disable it from auto-starting, and reboot the machine (closes all open connections)
  2. On Linux (only OS I have here). Delete the Preferences.xml file. (windows and OSX have their equivalents to cause it to THINK a fresh, first-run case)
  3. Start up PMS
  4. Open your browser http://127.0.0.1:32400/web
  5. click the ‘Got it’.
  6. Look for the “What’s This?” in the lower right corner. TAKE IT
  7. accept limited (non-plex pass) features for the moment
  8. Continue through AS IF first setup but DO NOT create any library sections… They will be there waiting for you.
  9. When you get to the Dashboard, your sections are there.
  10. Settings - Server - General . If it’s already signed in (it might)… Touch nothing else sign it into your account.
  11. Settings - Server - Remote Access. If green and connected, Touch nothing (it’s using UPnP / NAT-PMP). This may take a moment after signing in to go green so be patient. (up to a minute).
  12. Enable Remote access if it’s sitting there disabled. BUT, it may not work… If it’s going to work, it should already be green

This is the annoying part of the workaround… Stop PMS, delete Preferences.xml, restart PMS and do it again. It WILL make it.

When you get it… leave it.

I hope this has helped explain the situation as it is known.

I followed your instructions with one caveat, I couldn’t initially get port 32400 to automatically connect until I manually specified public port 32400. All previous methods didn’t work except for your advice. Thank you.

22

So we’re all good? I think one part of your question is answered but the other is not. Please clarify?

23

  1. Remote Access is good when using Manually Specified Public Port and is accessible outside my network.

  2. Not setting the port manually will produce error:

“Not available outside your network”
“Your server is signed in to Plex, but is not reachable from outside your network.”

and this ->: Private x.x.x.x : 32400 Public x.x.x.x : 0 X Internet
(ip addy’s removed)

–
I have always had the port manually set to a port other than 32400. I’m good with the port set manually.

24

Thanks, That’s what I hoped you meant.

In spite of your success and my success, it flies in the face of others who can’t make that work.

Can you spell Migraine? :dizzy:

haha

25

Personally, I don’t care for upnp and anything that attempts to “automatically” setup my router. I have always and forever manually setup port forwarding/NAT and it has always worked. Maybe for those having issues a WireShark capture could help in seeing where communication is dying off the vine? It could atleast tell you if traffic is leaving the router properly and what is coming back in if anything. If you’re not a network admin you’re probably not going to understand the output but i bet @ChuckPA would. Remember, some ISPs do funny stuff with ports so you might also check that as well?

26

What we have is this… Please forgive my comedic attempt to be funny because if I can’t find some humor in it, I’d go crazy. (Better to act crazy then be crazy, imho)

  1. The servers exist “out there somewhere” (the cloud) and can be anywhere in the world for all we know.
  2. The logical hosts which make up Plex’s “cluster” and handle all of our ‘remote access’ coordination are not guaranteed to be co-located.
  3. Now we introduce the ISPs and their loosely coupled spider-web network which might route your modem traffic through Atlanta, take a hop to their Maine hub, before getting on the transoceanic fiber to the first Plex server in Europe somewhere.
  4. For me, my ISP takes my connection, routes it 30 miles away to the main fiber.
  5. That ‘main’ makes the trip to Arkansas on it’s way to Florida where it eventually hops out in the direction of the Plex servers.
  6. Landfall for that line is a different location.
  7. Next come all the intermediate hops to eventually get to the server.

But wait… . there’s more!

That server gets my request and does the required communication with its counterpart which, you guessed it, is somewhere else in the world!

When they are done, the messages come back from each involved server and you guessed it…

Using potentially completely random return paths.

While this is happening, your local PMS has done its thing and is waiting for the final two pieces to complete. One verifies the ports are open. The other tells it to get ready for the test and to respond.

It should be obvious if the remote access test gets there ahead of when PMS is told to expect it.

It fails, and all the flags set are reset. The dominoes fall backward.

The solution to this…

"Can be yours if the price is … " hahaha

(seriously: we see the what, where, and how, the WHY isn’t making any sense. We’ve got some tactical changes we’re working on. Since this represents a pretty fundamental change to the core mechanism, it must be 10,000% solid before moving forward.

What I can also share is:

  1. I’ve just taken my system and moved a fully static port configuration to port 33600
  2. I had PMS stopped when creating the port forwarding in the router.
  3. All LAN IPs are static.
  4. PMS configuration is manual port mapping (edited by hand in Preferences.xml)
  5. Start PMS
  6. Remote Access works (from this geographic location, with the moon in this relative proximity) :slight_smile:
  7. I leave it alone.
  8. It survives WAN IP address changes without incident.
  9. It survives upgrades also

… And now we return you to your originally scheduled programming :dizzy:

27

Wow…very disappointed as I’m experiencing the same problem. Except I’m on a Mac and nothing in this thread seems to help me out. Also…It’s very disappointing to be paying for a service and the service cannot figure out it’s own problem with connection. The tech info provided in these forums are hit and miss and this whole company has become very frustrating. Cannot renew my account if this problem cannot be addressed in a workable fashion and will look for other alternatives. Sorry for the attitude, but I’m just a layman and have spent numerous hours trying to address this problem which seems unaddressable even by the Plex community and certainly by Plex itself. Horrible customer service.

28

@barryman777 - Sorry you are having issues. Can you provide some details? Are you trying to use UPnP or did you set up port forwarding? What have you tried and what trouble shooting steps have you performed?

29

I had the same problem for the last 2 days. Playing with Plex configuration, checking the router UPNP entries and still had the same problem (remote access failed). I am running on windows 10 and ESET smart security. I disable the firewall in ESET and everything seems fine. Now I add a rule in ESET’s firewall to allow the port 32400 in both direction. It works for me right now after enabling the firewall.

30

Exact same problem here. Had been using Plex for years then when I buy a new Mac Mini just to be my server, I have no remote access. Tried everything with no luck and no support from Plex. Also cancelling my account and being forced to find an alternative.

31

@rafaelmayor

In looking at your logs, you have a network configuration problem.

I don’t know how to address it for Macs but when a program can’t make a simple TCP broadcast to the LAN, it’s a host configuration (or firewall) problem. Here is why I say so.

Apr 24, 2017 21:06:08.428 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:08.428 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:08.428 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 239.255.255.250: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:13.425 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:13.425 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:18.428 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:18.428 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:18.428 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 239.255.255.250: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:23.427 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
Apr 24, 2017 21:06:23.427 [0x700000d5f000] WARN - NetworkServiceBrowser: Error sending out discover packet from 192.168.0.19 to 192.168.0.255: Can't assign requested address
32

Has this issue progressed to where a PMS is no longer reachable from outside the network?