Weird server behavior

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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I have plex running on a local device (plex1) on my home network via docker. It works great, and does everything as designed. I have another plex docker container running the same exact docker compose file (plex2) on a separate network that I vpn into.

For the life of me I cannot seem to get two servers showing up. When I login to plex 2 by IP, it thinks its plex1 because I signed in with my plex account. For some reason plex is treating the servers as the same until I turn off Plex1. If I rename the server in plex1s menu, its reflected on plex2. But if I turn off Plex2, it acts like a plex client instead of a server (I installed it as server).

Am I missing something? Research seems to indicate that you can have multiple plex servers under one account. Im horribly lost.

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I even stopped plex1 server and rebuilt plex2 from scratch. Once I log in it doesn’t treat plex2 as a server and treats it like a client of plex1. What is going on??

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Plex.tv sees 1 soft-deleted server ‘rocket’.

You can have multiple servers on your account, each on different hosts with different LAN IPs and WAN (Remote Access) ports.

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Hi chuckpa,
So i renamed plex1 and then turned it off.
Thats great to hear I can have multiple servers…didn’t think that would be an issue.

Any idea why my second server is only working as a client as opposed to a full on media server? I don’t want to use plex1 aka rocket anymore but until I can get plex2 to show up as a server kinda stuck.

Both installs are on separate networks in different geographical areas.

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It’s not behaving as a client.
What’s happening is Plex/web isn’t seeing it as CLAIMED (attached) to your account so it flips over to whatever it finds – which is the other.

Plex’s players, even though they load FROM the server, actually “float”.
This what’s happening to you.

To make this work right and get your other server properly added to your account.

  1. Close the browser (clear out cached credentials)
  2. Open fresh with a new Private/Incognito window
  3. Now open the new server by its LAN IP only (http://lan.ip.of.server:32400/web)
  4. It will want you to sign in.
  5. You should see the ‘Got it’ message
  6. Now, you’ll get into Setttings - Server - General and find it’s not claimed.
  7. Now you can.

If this doesn’t work (you have a non-standard network maybe? or other things Plex doesn’t like ?), then there is another way

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Ok that makes sense.

I ended up being able to claim it. But for some reason in the docker image I was using if I didn’t pass the claim token via env variables it would not let me claim the server in the gui. Was fighting with this a bunch and wasn’t always able to get it match up right. The claiming process seems a little buggy (but now that I figured it out sorta its not bad)…I do have a chromecast that was using the old server, and I had to sign out of it and then sign back in and pair it to the new server to receive the new media server change. Which was strange…Anyway its working now! Thanks for the advice!

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Future:

what you need is:

  • Environment variable PLEX_CLAIM=token

  • Use the token within 5 minutes (within 4 is easier to think of)

  • Make sure the host you’re defining doesn’t already exist.
    – Fresh container
    – Plex.tv has no record of the server in Authorized Devices

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