None of my LAN streaming devices are able to connect to my PMS unless I have the ‘Enable Relay’ option selected. When I de-select that option, logging on my streaming client shows this:
07-29 10:01:39.408 i: [device] Setting selected server to FRINGEPLEX version: 1.28.0.5998-adb79ff3b owned: true home: false videoTranscode: true audioTranscode: true deletion: true class: null, presence false
07-29 10:01:39.419 i: [ContentSectionNavigation] Navigating to path /library/sections/1/all?type=1
07-29 10:01:39.423 i: [ServerClaimingHelper] Server FRINGEPLEX cannot be claimed: it doesn’t have required conditions
07-29 10:21:42.273 i: Time out fetching https://192.168.1.40:32400/media/providers?includePreferences=1&X-Plex-Token=...2td.
07-29 10:21:42.273 w: [MediaProvidersApiClient] FRINGEPLEX Couldn’t fetch providers. Result: Error (null)
07-29 10:21:42.279 i: [SourceManagerFetcher:0706] Starting to process sources for provider MediaProviderSourceProvider.
07-29 10:21:42.294 i: [SourceManagerFetcher:0706] Processing 4 sections.
07-29 10:21:42.297 i: [[ServerSectionPrunePredicate]] Ignoring item Movies (FRINGEPLEX) because its content source is not reachable
07-29 10:21:42.299 i: [DiscoverContentSectionHubsTask] server://9a020886b3ebb4d7a7e9dd2ddd3417c07030d9ac/com.plexapp.plugins.library Not discovering because content source is unreachable.
07-29 10:21:42.300 i: [[ServerSectionPrunePredicate]] Ignoring item TV Shows (FRINGEPLEX) because its content source is not reachable
07-29 10:21:42.301 w: [DynamicHomeHubsDiscoveryTask] Couldn’t discover hubs from server://9a020886b3ebb4d7a7e9dd2ddd3417c07030d9ac/com.plexapp.plugins.library.
I’m no expert on these logs, but I’m hoping someone out here can give me some tips to get this working. Thank you!
In the settings of your PMS, under Network, did you enter anything in LAN Networks ?
Is a client named tvOS (Living Room) making requests, but it seems to come from: [127.0.0.1:55173 (WAN)]
Since I doubt your Living Room TV is integrated on your Windows box, and also making requests via the loopback, anything else regarding your network setup, that might be worth mentioning?
That’s odd. I don’t have Plex installed on any TVs, only my Amazon Fire and AppleTV devices. That one is likely an AppleTV.
As for my networking setup, I have a flat network, all one subnet (192.168.1.0/24), no VLANs, out-of-the-box default setup from a Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine router/firewall, and no LAN traffic restrictions on my router. Everything is wide open. UPnP is enabled on the router as well as in Plex.
My PMS is at IP address 192.168.1.40 and the streamer I’m testing with most is at 192.168.1.223. I have all firewalls and Antivirus now disabled on my PMS Windows 10 Pro box. The 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0 is set as a LAN network in Plex. But I have removed/re-added that a number of times with no apparent changes in behavior.
Thank you @OttoKerner! That’s some great advice. I already have Secure Connections to preferred, but the DNS rebinding protection is new to me. Any chance you know how to create that exception? Thank you!
You can rule out DNS rebinding protection as being the issue by using a DNS provider other than your UDM (for example, CloudFlare). To do so:
Log into your controller.
Navigate to Settings → Networks and select your LAN network (probably named “Default,” unless you’ve changed it).
Scroll that page down to DHCP and click the “Show options” drop-down next to DHCP Service Management.
Enable DHCP DNS Server and enter the following IP addresses for the first and second entries: 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1.
Click the Apply Changes button.
Allow some time for the gateway to be re-provisioned (you should be able to see when this is completed on the Devices screen) and then reboot the Plex clients on which you’re experiencing the issues. After they’ve restarted, try playing some content to see if it’s being relayed or not.
I don’t think that changing the DNS server does change anything about DNS rebinding protection.
The former cares about name resolution outside of your home network. The latter is all about name resolution inside of the local network.
You can check another way. On a PC client which experiences the issue, try to ping your server’s *.plex.direct FQDN. There’s some information in this post which describes how to determine what that is:
The final FQDN will look something like this: 192-168-1-40.certificateUUID.plex.direct
Use the link above to find your CertificateUUID in the Windows registry on your server; it will be an alpha-numeric string. When you ping that FQDN on your client system, it should resolve to your server’s IP address.
It absolutely does. The settings I suggested change the DNS servers supplied to the clients via DHCP. The above essentially tells clients to use 1.1.1.1 for DNS resolution, instead of the default of using the router itself. This, of course, assumes that DNS servers haven’t been manually configured on the clients themselves, thereby ignoring those supplied via DHCP (or not requesting them at all).
You can prove this to yourself by doing something like the following on your own server; replace the hyphen-separated IP address with your own local server IP address and the certificateUUID with your own: dig @1.1.1.1 192-168-1-40.yourcertificateUUID.plex.direct
Note that the certificateUUID is not the same as your Plex Online Token. You’ll have to grab it from the Windows registry on a Windows system.
Fun fact: Plex’s DNS servers don’t care what hyphen-separated IP address you provide at the front of that FQDN, as long as it’s valid. It will even try to normalize some invalid ones; for example, it will resolve 300-300-300-300.blahblahblah.plex.direct to 44.44.44.44. It seems it converts each octet to an 8-bit value, so 300 overflows (underflows?) to 44.
Do you have Client Device Isolation enabled on your Wi-Fi network(s)? If enabled, it will prevent wireless clients from directly connecting to other clients on the same network. This is a Wi-Fi network-specific setting. You can just search for “isolation” in your Unifi controller, or examine each Wi-Fi network individually.
I even changed my PMS server IP address to 192.168.1.5, just to test. The ping still resolves correctly (to the updated IP address). Yet still no LAN access to Plex from my devices. I can access 192.168.1.5:32400 directly on my Plex Server box, but not on any network-connected devices.
Are you running another software which grabs a lot of port numbers? Like a Torrent client for instance. Close everything else, then start Plex server and repeat the connection attempt.
