Hello
Note that I am only interested in the technical details and I already have alternative for remote access.
As you may know Plex made some changes recently and remote access became a paid feature.
At first I thought that only people using plex.tv who will be impacted as they are using their relay feature. But I was surprised that accessing the server by its public IP is considered as a remote access (it make sense though).
So I thought that putting Plex behind a reverse proxy in the same network will solve the issue. Plex will see a local connection from the reverse proxy and treat it as a direct access. But still Plex detect that as a remote access. I even tweaked the host and headers passed by reverse proxy with no success.
Plex even consider accessing the server using a local domain as a remote access.
So I tested tailscale, I ran it on the server and tried to access Plex using the assigned IP but my access is considered a remote access. Now I ran tailscale on the client and accessing Plex from it is considered a direct access.
At first I thought Plex was checking the url but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
Can someone explain me how does Plex detect remote vs local access?
its most likely using the ip space of the primary interface to establish the local network and any tun interfaces are scene as remote automatically.
From what you’ve said, probably multiple ways.
It sounds as though they’ve deliberately implemented some kinds of checks to lock the feature down and get people to pay up.
I don’t know how it impacts the paid feature changes recently but you can add additional “LAN Networks” to Plex in the “Network” tab in the Settings to consider additional IP Ranges as a LAN network. I believe the LAN detection is based on the original subnet of the server where traffic from any other range is treated as WAN access.
