Plex Port Forwarding via ASUS RT-AC86U with Shaw XB7(Bridged)

[Sonicmojo]

Up here in the Great White North - we are with Shaw (Calgary) - using the Technicolor CGM4331COM (XB7) gateway in bridged mode.

The RT-AC86U is using Merlin 386.7

All internet traffic flows from the LAN out to my ASUS RT-AC86U and then out to the world via the XB7. General networking has been rock solid and I have not had a need to even log into the XB7 for months and months.

I have been running Plex on the LAN for at least 2 years and I am now experimenting with a wider reach for it by allowing external access to phones etc from the outside world.

But for the life of me - I am hitting a total brick wall on getting Plex port forwarding working. I have read tutorial after tutorial, post after post and I have the required port (32400) setup correctly on the ASUS. I have a DHCP Reservation in place for my Plex server and everything else is in place - however as soon as I hit Enable Remote Access in Plex - I get the nice "green" message saying “Fully Accessible Outside Your Network” for just about 5 seconds and then it reverts back to the nasty "red/warning" - “Not available outside your local network”

I have checked port 32400 from the actual Plex server using several tools and all of them keep telling me that 32400 is closed. Windows firewall (as far as I can see) is allowing all port activity from Plex Media Server and the ASUS is setup and as ready as it can be.

I am now getting suggestions from other folks on other forums saying I need to fire up UpNP on the AC86U - which I understand to be a no-no. Others are saying maybe the Windows Firewall on the server box is causing issues (I do not think it is)

I captured these errors from Plex logging when trying to connect yesterday:

Warning — [Req#104] NAT: PMP, got an error: NATPMP_ERR_RECVFROM.

Warning — [HttpClient/HCl#51] HTTP error requesting GET https://**-**-***-***.5b7b0da4e242411abc954b1d95190efd.plex.direct:32400/identity (7, Couldn't connect to server) (Failed to connect to **-**-***-***.5b7b0da4e242411abc954b1d95190efd.plex.direct port 32400: Connection refused)

Where **-**-***-*** is my (WAN Network) public Shaw IP according to the internal Admin page for the XB7 (BlueCurve). Does not tell me much but does tell me Connection Refused - from either the public Shaw IP (XB7) OR the RT-AC86U

I am completely stumped. I have consulted with at least a half dozen other (Technicolor CGM4331COM XB7) users and they swear that the XB7 firewall "should" be allowing ALL traffic into my network and should not be influencing anything negative on port 32400

Appreciate any info you can share on this.

Cheers!

NR

 

[Justinh]

Make sure your network in Windows is set to private and that your firewall rules match accordingly. If there is no server to accept packets when you do your external port test, then the test will fail. You could run a simple web server (or a number of other things) with the port configured with 32400 just to test the external connection, then you know you are down to Plex being the issue.

And your ISP allows traffic on port 32400? You might need to map a well-known port (443, 8080, etc) to your internal 32400 port. That works for me.

 

[Sonicmojo]

Just wanted to circle back to this and say this issue is now solved. I engaged Shaw this morning for a tech session and it appears that even though my interface (XB7) seemed to indicate (via it's admin portal) that this device WAS bridged - after they checked this out on their end - it seems it was NOT bridged at all.

Once they fixed this on their end - all is good. Plex is accessible outside the network.

Cheers!

Sonic.