ATG 30: How to Remote Access Plex Media Server With Port Forwarding

TWiT Shows Ask The Tech Guy (vintage)
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Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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Leo, you’re slightly off on one point. You don’t need to remotely access your Plex server through an IP address or dynamic DNS. You can, but that’s the hard way. Instead, you can log in at Plex.tv. Once you’re logged in, you click Launch to open the desktop. That will show all of your Plex servers that are logged into your Plex account and have Remote Access turned on.

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@PaulMcElligott I suspect that option doesn’t work if you follow Steve Gibson’s advice and have disabled network plug and play… because then Plex can’t configure your router/gateway on your behalf. @Leo could have mentioned the easy option first though.

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Yeah I should have mentioned the NAT traversal method. I use direct addressing so I forgot the easy way! Mostly I wanted to do a piece on port forwarding and was just using Plex as an example.

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You got the large private IP address range wrong, it’s not 10.0.x.x it’s 10.x.x.x.

There is also the range that is almost never used of:
172.16.0.0 to 172.31.255.255

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So many modern PC games that still require port forwarding to work 100%. Will be easier for me to send this video to friends rather than trying to walk them through it, thanks Leo!

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When you reserve an internal IP address on your router that points to where the server is, how does the router “remember” that device in case you shut down that device or the router? Does it base it on the MAC address?

Is it necessary in additional to the steps mentioned by Leo to create a static internal IP address for the device where the Plex server is? For example, I have the server on my iMac. I went into settings and Network and assigned it a internal static IP.

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If you are using DHCP reservation, then it uses the MAC address of the device to form the basis of the reservation. DHCP is a broadcast protocol, and the device broadcasts what amounts to “hello DHCP server, my MAC is xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx can you please tell me my network configuration?” which includes the assigned IP address lease.

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