I have a machine that I’ve used for years, from way back in the early FreeNAS era up until 13.0-U6.8.
Recently, I’ve updated it, step-by-step, to 25.04.2.4. It’s working great, except for a problem with Plex.
I realized that, by leaving the 13.0 world behind, my iocage-based Plex environment would be nuked, but I figured I’d just pick up the pieces afterwards.
And to a large extent it’s gone fine. Within about 15 minutes, I had my media dataset wired into the Plex app; it can see all my stuff, I can drop new stuff in there, and it all shows up.
But I can’t play anything.
Let’s say I’m on my Mac, called pigdog.homenet.ecb (my home domain is “homenet.ecb”). I point my browser at server.homenet.ecb:32400, and Plex’s interface comes up and looks perfect. However, when I try to play a show, I’ll get a pop-up from Plex telling me I need a “remote watch pass”.
The same thing happens with my Roku box (which is roku.homenet.ecb): I can see all my stuff, but if I try to play something, I’ll get that same “remote watch pass” pop-up.
After digging around in Plex, I was looking at its console and came across the following log entry:
Request came in with unrecognized domain / IP ‘server.homenet.ecb’ in header Host; treating as non-local
On a hunch, I then pointed my browser at 192.168.100.252:32400 (that’s the IP for server.homenet.ecb), and I can play stuff with no problems.
On the Roku, I found that I could add a “manual connection” to 192.168.100.252:32400; when I do that, I can also see–and play–everything Plex is serving.
But this is a kludge, particularly since Plex (the company) will happily reference the “supposedly non-local and non-playable” server.homenet.ecb:32400, which my Roku will dutifully show me preferentially over the manually-connected 192.168.100.252:32400.
All this used to work using only server.homenet.ecb:32400 from any machine on my home network. Even browsing to Plex’s site (plex.tv) from a machine on my network and using the “Open Plex” button would bring up a fully-functional view of server.homenet.ecb:32400.
I added “server.homenet.ecb” to Plex’s “Local Networks” list in its configuration, but that didn’t work.
As I’m typing this, I just realized that, no matter what system I’m attempting to connect to server.homenet.ecb:32400 from, Plex’s console always logs the request coming in as server.homenet.ecb. Shouldn’t I see either the FQDN (or at least the IP) of the requesting system?
If anyone could shed some light on this (or even just ask me questions that’ll help me figure it out myself), I’d greatly appreciate it.