Plex App advertises itself with an FQDN, but then treats that FQDN as Non-Local

Apps and Virtualization
1

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.

2

Just wanted to post a quick update to close out this thread.

I’ve decided to just access it via IP address.

I’m annoyed that something that “just worked” under the FreeBSD-based TrueNAS line has proven to be either something that’s no longer possible or, more likely, something that’s possible, but only under some permutation of settings across Plex Media Server, Docker, TrueNAS, and plex.tv that I’ve not discovered.

3

I had this problem as well, after pulling half my hair out I found the solution. To trick the plex into ‘recognizing’ the domain… the domain plex.domain.tld needs to be set as the shortname in the container or vm hosting the plex, and it works!

4

Thanks for your response! I want to make sure I’m completely understanding what you’re saying. Where you typed “…the domain plex.domain.tld”, what do you mean, exactly? Do you mean the fully-qualified domain name for the machine running my server (in my case, that would be “server.homenet.ecb”), or do you mean something else?

5

Yes, in your case server.homenet.ecb domain the shortname would be ‘server’ so when the Plex is Authenticating its lookup is searching for server.homenet.ecb which it sees as unrecognized but ‘server’ is recognized as it is the host itself. So if you can change the shortname to match the fqdn such as server.homenet.ecb.homenet.ecb where the shortname covers the full fqdn as ‘server.homenet.ecb’ this will trick the Plex into recognizing the fqdn. Hope that makes sense. Although I’m not using a TrueNAS and using a proxmox container I think it’s all the same. If the hostname shortname matches your set fqdn the Plex will recognize it during authentication

6

Thanks for the clarification; I’ll give it a try.