Earlier today I purchased a years' worth of VPN service from Private Internet Access. The service was awesome but my Plex stopped working. Duh! I should have thought about that before buying a VPN. PIA quickly refunded my money after I contacted customer support, A+ for customer service!
Anyway, I don't have a VPN just because I'm anal about keeping my plex media server online (lots of friends and family depend on it).
I haven't found any comprehensive tutorials on how to use plex with a VPN. Can anyone magically solve this problem? I've been through every forum I can find on the Plex website/internet and can't find a clear solution.
My other option, I vaguely understand, would be to build a separate machine that doesn't use VPN for my media server. Is it possible to build a NAS running Plex connected directly to my ISP, download content anonymously from my VPN protected PC and transfer it to the NAS all sneaky peaky like?
I'm interested in building a NAS due to Tek's recent prject anyway.
Any thoughts?
I believe the problem is with port forwarding. I know that PIA will give you one open port which it chooses randomly, so you would have to change plex's port each time you connected. Alternatively you can use a VPN which forwards all ports, or just doesn't use NAT and that way it will work more or less like normal.
Another option, and I'm not really sure if you can do this, would be to have plex use the regular internet connection rather than the VPN. I'm not sure exactly how to do that or even if that's something you'd want to do.
If you do decide to use a separate machine for plex so that it uses the regular connection then you can always run plex on a virtual machine. You could still store the files on the machine which does the downloading and just share it over the network to the plex VM.
Do people use your Plex server from only inside your LAN? Or is it outside, from the internet, as well?
It shouldnt effect your LAN connections, and that could be easily fixed with a second network card that doesnt connect to the internet, for people to connect to for plex on your local network.
Yeah, people access the server remotely. Both of your solutions, Dexter, would be fine if I had the slightest idea how to implement them.
Calling all nerds!
Yeah, people access the server remotely. Both of your solutions, Dexter, would be fine if I had the slightest idea how to implement them.
Calling all nerds!
Try a dynamicDNS.
No matter what your IP address is, the dynamic DNS will always point at your PC.