I still don’t understand how I would be able to connect to my Plex server without having a DNS or static public IP address

243 viewsOtherTechnology
0 Comments

Before I posted her I asked AI a bit..
It told me that plex doesn’t act as the middle man by using your account, and that it instead uses NAT traversal techniques…
Now im even more confused because i know to connect to any device over the internet youd need an ip address, which changes constantly.

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The Plex service continuously updates a set of dynamic dns names managed by the Plex network that point to your IP address and are associated with your Plex server under your account. When someone signed into the Plex authentication service says “I’d like to connect to dokha’s server”, Plex says sure, here’s the DNS that currently points to their server. When you try to connect it will do some handshakes and determine if you’re registered to connect to that server, etc etc

Anonymous 0 Comments

> it instead uses NAT traversal techniques…

NAT hole punching! It’s a super weird trick that relies on abusing how connections are established through firewalls/NAT. It relies on the fact that firewalls must allow the responses for outgoing requests back in (or it would be pointless to send requests).

Both parties connect to a third party mediator server which pairs them up and sends the other machine’s external IP and port to them. When each of them have the other party’s external address and a valid port, the old switcheroo happens: both of them send a connection request to each other. This causes the firewalls to temporarily open a path back in through that port from that IP address – just in time for the other side’s connection request to arrive.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This is more of a /r/Plex question then an ELI5 question, but the general idea is that while your Plex server is online, it has a TCP connection with Plex’s own servers. The TCP handshake, involves your server sending its IP address to the Plex server to initiate the connection.

So long as your server is periodically making connections to the central Plex server, it can act as a “DNS-like” service to anyone you grant access to, by just giving them the IP address that it knows belongs to your server