Thanks, that does actually make some sense. I was planning on building my own pfsense router anyway which may get bumped up my priority list because of this.
What I still don’t understand in that situation though is why it works when I set the router vlan to 1
I think like was mentioned previously, if everything on your network was set to vlan 101 it might work.
a vlan is like a physical lan (ie like a dedicated switch only for certain computers/devices).
everything on the same vlan can talk to each other.
anything NOT on the same vlan cannot talk to each other, without going through a router or some kind of smart/enterprise switch that can do VLAN routing.
a vlan router has rules that say this port can talk to vlan 1 and vlan 101
this other port can talk to vlan 1 and vlan 102
this other port can talk to 101 and 101 but not 1.
and so on with many different variations and capabilities depending on the nature of the switch and/or router.
I did not mention in the thread, due to trying to keep it simple, but I wonder if enabling IPv6 support in the PMS server would help him out.
If he has a working ip6 stack, and he enables ip6 on all his devices that are capable of it, then that could alleviate the whole vlan issue.
I have got no further with this at all, and its got to the point where plex is pretty much unusable. Everything now is as default from the ISP, I have run wireshark on my PC to capture packets. I can see the UDP Upnp traffic if i set the router PPPoE VLAN to 1 and if i set it back to 101 I dont even see that traffic on my local machine?
I have tried setting VLAN 101 on my switch for everything and still cant see the UDP Upnp traffic. I’m pretty stuck on this now
everything else on my network works perfectly, i can happily send UDP traffic between devices, any ideas what is different about this? Does plex do anything funky with the udp packets? As an alternative can i turn off the transcoder timeout and manually kill the process if any trancodes are left running?
like I said before, you need to contact your isp and ask them to switch you to ROUTER mode (not your current BRIDGED mode), and assign you a public ip.
You are going to continue to have problems with plex, because plex needs to be accessible from the internet, and the way your ISP has your internet setup interferes with that.
You may or may not be able to work around with that pfsense router you mentioned, but either way, its apparent that it is not going to work properly as it is.
I sort of get what you are saying but I have no issues connecting in remotely, I can port forward perfectly. I’m also running a web server locally which i can access externally with no issues, plus if i take the router out of the situation surely my pc on the same switch as PMS should be able to communicate?
well, not sure what else to suggest then, if you are able to access a local web server remotely then it doesn’t appear that your isp is actively blocking incoming connections.
you can start narrowing down all the network components to just your internet box, switch with only your pms server and pc are plugged into it.
you may want to check the pms settings to make sure that ‘secure’ connections are not required.
plexweb > settings > network > secure connection = disabled or preferred.
you should try accessing pms from both https://app.plex.tv/desktop# and directly from the IP of the server http://pms-server-ip:32400/manage
and see if they behave differently with the transcoder stopping
Thanks for your continued help, really appreciated!
So if i disconnect the router from the switch and with no vlans everything works fine as soon as i connect the router back to the switch the UDP packets stop. What i’m struggling to understand is why that makes a difference? Surely my devices are unaware of their VLANiD, they just send the packets and its the router or switches job to know what it can and cant connect to? I am running DNS and DHCP from a VM on my ESXI, not from the router so that isnt the issue as it works fine when just the router is disconnected.
As for the steps you recommended I can access both via its local ip and app.plex.tv and get the same behaviour. I also disabled the secure connection and also get the same behaviour.
well if you remove the router (bridge) and everything works as expected, then there has to be something about that device that is blocking or otherwise interfering packets on your network.
if your isp won’t help you get your router into real router mode, then you should try to get pfsense going so you can separate that internet box from the rest of your network, while still keeping internet access.
your pfsense router will need 2 network connections;
ee box <> pfsense <> lan/switch
I assume i can achieve the same if i opted for openwrt or Ubiquiti Edge Router? I assume in that setup i would be double NATed and would have to forward ports through both NATs?
Hopefully my last question! For remote streams, how do they send the status UDP packet, do i have to forward both TCP and UDP on port 32400?
yes.
the other I don’t know, but that would make sense to me.
Hi again,
Since I last posted I now have replaced my ISP router with a Unifi Security Gatway and a Netgear dm200 in modem only. I have set up PPPOE from the router to modem with VLAN 101 and i am still getting this issue.
I have noticed that the issue seems to be related to internet connectivity (whereas before i suspected it to be the router) - if i am connected to the internet the transcoder times out and if not connected it works perfectly.
It does seem when connected to the internet or not i still receive a 200 from the poll request (always after ~20000ms)
Does anybody have any further ideas what could be causing this? What is different when connected to the internet? I have tried ditching local DNS but the issue is the same.
Thanks 
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