Why can't I access Plex.TV?

General Discussions
1

I’ve been having an issue for nearly a week now. I cannot access Plex.TV from any device on my home network.

I can access forums.Plex.tv but not Plex.tv (which is needed to login to the forums). My server cannot access what it needs to get metadata either. Basically it seems I’ve been blocked from Plex.tv. my ISP is virgin media if that helps at all and I was briefly able to access Plex.tv through a VPN but can no longer even access it that way.

All other sites can be accessed fine and Plex functions locally. My Plex server is running on a recently updated truenas scale 21.08.

2

Are you employing a custom DNS blocklist? in your anti virus software or your router firewall?
Or perhaps are you using a “security appliance” like pi-hole or the like?
Does your Virgin router provide a feature to block “malicious websites” and the like?

3

I do run a pihole on the network but i have tried setting the DNS to cloudflare, google and even opendns all ending up with the same result of Plex.tv not even attempting to load.

I have also tried to add Plex.tv to the whitelist in pihole.

4

Does the pi hole filter by domain names or by IP addresses?
If the latter, you can’t use it that way. All of plex.tv is

  1. on a cloud structure where individual IP addresses can change all the time
  2. a lot of the servers are additionally protected by Cloudflare, so IP addresses are sometime shared with a lot of other sites
5

I don’t think it is pihole as right now I have the pihole offline and am bypassing it completely and I still cannot load the Plex.tv main page with any DNS.

6

Then I’d go spelunking in the settings of the Virgin Hub (or however they call their routers these days).

7

The virgin media hub (or whatever it is) is in bridge mode and I use an opnsense firewall appliance as my router which I have been using for years without issue. I tried disabling all rules in the firewall about messing with DNS and even restarted the firewall but the issue remains.

8

Sorry, I can’ thelp you with this router software. Just try it with a “basic” configuration without any blacklists etc. and see if you can reach plex.tv again.
It certainly is not a global issue but restricted your home network. So it has to do with your own router/firewall/security appliance/whatever.

9

After downgrading opnsense from 21.7.3 to 21.7.1 and reapplying the firewall rules it seems that plex.tv is accessible once again.

Really strange that only this 1 site was affected. Especially since plex.tv doesn’t appear in any of the firewall rules or in any blocklist’s that are configured in pihole.

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10

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