I travel a lot so I’m trying to set up two iMacs as Plex Media Servers so that if one machine fails while I’m away I’ll have a backup. I have set the router up with port forwarding as follows:
Both servers say that they are available outside the network.
However, only one server is available at a time, both on the LAN and outside the network.
Currently, only Sellotape shows up on all devices whether the device is on the LAN or outside the network.
For example, I just looked at the machine that hosts Valentine. But, the only server shown on the player is the one on the other machine, Sellotape. I went to Sellotape and closed Plex Media Server. Back to the other machine and now Valentine shows up there.
On my iPad Sellotape shows up as the server. But this is impossible because PMS is not running on Sellotape. Still I’m able to look at the library labeled as Sellotape. But, based on the contents of the library, it is clearly Valentine.
I should note that Valentine (the M1 iMac) was set up using Apple’s Migration Assistant with Sellotape (the Intel iMac) as the source. I thought this might be the cause of the server confusion, so I deleted PMS and all the related files I could find on Valentine and reinstalled and set everything up again. This did not solve the problem.
So, what do I need to do to get both servers to show up to all players on the LAN and outside of the local network?
Did you create the second server using the guide to migrate an installation? This will create an actual clone of the old server, keeping its old machine identifier… therefore Plex is treating them as one and will only recognize one at a time.
You can remove the various properties via the Mac‘s terminal:
Thanks. This was a good shot, but, in the end, it didn’t work.
(Note that in the OP I point out that the Valentine server was probably installed when I did a Migration Assistant setup of the new M1 iMac. I had previously deleted that installation and all related files, but that didn’t solve the problem)
So, I went ahead and followed the instructions in the post to which you referred. After deleting the keys in the Valentine PMS plist file I went to the server setup and was surprised to see that the suggest Friendly Name was Sellotape. Where the heck did that come from? I thought Plex defaulted to the machine name. How could it possibly default to a neighboring machine’s name?
So, I entered Valentine as the Friendly Name. But, Valentine still doesn’t show up as a server on any client. And, it does not show up in the of Authorized Devices.
So, I went to Sellotape and deleted the same PMS plist. After doing that the Sellotape server became unavailable. So, I deleted it from the Authorized Devices list and restarted the server. It became available.
But, there is still no Valentine. It doesn’t show up as a server on any client and doesn’t show up in the Authorized Devices list.
What now?
So, I’m back where I started. Only one Plex server shows up at a time.
• Delete Sellotape from the Authorized Devices list. This causes the PMS to reinitialize. (Not sure if that’s the right word.)
• Completely delete PMS from Valentine. (ForkLift kindly offers to delete auxiliary files such as preferences and log files.) Note that I did this before but it didn’t have the desired result.
• Reinstall and configure PMS on Valentine.
As a result, both Sellotape and Valentine show up in the Authorized Devices list with their correct names.
And, both servers now appear in every Plex client that I’ve tried.
