This has been a problem for me since… 2021 and has followed me through several different routers and architectures but I’ve never had a chance to really dig into it.
All of my Plex traffic on my dashboard always shows up as ‘Local’. On the network tab, I have 192.168.1.0/24 setup under LAN networks, but it seems to count everything as Local, mostly confusing when I’m streaming to someone external.
This has followed me through several rebuilds, so I’m pretty sure it’s something I’m doing, but what is the expected setup for this? Anyone have any ideas what I’m likely missing, where else should I look for details?
I found other people talking about that one and tried turning off ‘Treat WAN IP as LAN Bandwidth’ yesterday, but doesn’t seem to have changed anything, it is currently unchecked. Still seems like everything is being treated as local bandwidth.
Weird extra observation. Actual streams look like they’re being treated as ‘remote’ if I fiddle with things, it looks like it’s just the dashboard that is busted.
The biggest reason for “Treat WAN IP as LAN IP” is when the ISP has provided you with a modem/router which has strict DNS Rebinding protection (which blocks Plex.direct domain from working on your LAN with your in-home players)
At some point, getting to see the actual startup DEBUG server logs will be required to resolve this. We’re reaching the end of “what might it be” without detailed info.
I was looking in the console logs and the info there was super basic, did not realize there were debug options until today though, I appreciate that heads up, thank you.
I’m looking through the logs myself after turning on debug just now and the only IP addresses I’m seeing referenced when trying to get a remote user to play an item is 127.0.0.1, but I’m happy to provide snippets if needed…
I think one thing I’m kinda stumped on is I’m not sure how/when plex would even determine local/remote and what that looks like. The most interesting item at first glance to me was the generic plex media server logs, but that hasn’t panned out so far, where should I be looking here?
127.0.0.1 = the machine’s internal (Myself only) network adapter. This has no outside connection and only talks between different programs/processes on the box.
10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x, and 172.16.x.x → 172.31.x.x are LAN address blocks per RFC-1918.
Everything else is Public (WAN) space.
plex makes the determination local/remote at the instant of connection.
It checks:
Is it on this box (loopback)
Is it on this subnet (as defined by host’s LAN adapter) - LOCAL
Everything I see in the logs even for remote users is entries similar to this:
May 10, 2024 17:18:37.544 [140699017567032] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:51544 (WAN)] GET /video/:/transcode/universal/session/4012e99fae3e0fb1-com-plexapp-android/base/00010.ts (15 live) #5075e3 TLS Signed-in
or this:
May 10, 2024 17:18:31.830 [140699731200824] DEBUG - Completed: [127.0.0.1:53296] 200 GET /:/timeline?audioStreamID=1794109&bufferedTime=28663&context=source
Obviously lots of variety, but that’s related to a remote user transcoding something to play on an android phone not on the network the server is on and I’m not sure if we expect there to be localhost traffic during transcoding as well?
I can’t find anything at all in the logs, even with debug one that mentions an external IP address it’s actually connecting to when a remote stream starts which may be getting closer to the problem?
I guess one other problem I have is that from here, I don’t have any examples of what ‘good’ data looks like.
To figure out what normal is & to make sense — Use the web browser (Plex/web)
It is a simple player. there is a clearly documented trail of traffic between the two.
But, I also tested more with a remote user. They were only able to use roku and all of their requests still look like this and are still only referencing localhost / 127.0.0.1:
May 10, 2024 19:40:02.862 [140698967018296] DEBUG - Request: [127.0.0.1:41530 (WAN)] GET /:/timeline?playbackTime=639260&time=4049000&state=playing&ratingKey=92739&key=%2Flibrary%2Fmetadata%2F92739&col=3&row=0&context=home%3Ahub.continueWatching&duration=7143136&playQueueItemID=603226 (19 live) #512f2f TLS GZIP Signed-in Token (dold72)
Why/how would these be logged as going to localhost? I feel like I’m still missing something. I did a ctrl-f for their public IP address and it does not show up anywhere in the logs.
