Emby connect made a fool out of me this morning..HELP!

[Ronstang 294]

Very frustrating morning, wanted to set up emby on my neighbors' TV for them and it simply defied it's name and would not connect for the life of me.

I have two servers.  One is beta and that is my test server and the newly created one is the latest stable build and that is the one I have been migrating tested and organized content to as I get it done.  The second is the server I wanted to share as it is ready for Prime Time.  I tried emby connect but it only wanted to connect to my first server which is one I don't want to share.  I made several trips back and forth to my house to see if I could figure out what I had done.

I realized both servers had the exact same WAN address so I changed the port on the new server and tried again but nothing changed.  I read an old thread about deleting the devices.txt file, did that and then no servers ever showed up trying to use emby connect again.   I read somewhere I needed to forward the port of the servers....but I never did this before I have connected to my original emby server using connect from remote locations successfully but I went ahead and forwarded the both ports and rebooted my router.  Now nothing was working.I also noticed my Premiere key was no longer working, it was entered but not showing as active, no matter how many times I tried it would not take it.....now almost 12 later just getting home it works again.  I couldn't connect to my other server using RDP but could see the machine....a reboot of that machine cured that.

But I never again ever saw any server available using emby connect after entering the pin on my account.  So I went ahead and entered the address manually with the new port and was able to connect the the second server but I also know that doing it this way it will some day disconnect so I want to understand what I am doing wrong here.

Is it possible to use emby connect to connect a new user at their location to my emby server?  If so, I have 2 servers so how do I connect to a specific server?  I have done this in the past but only to connect myself from my brother's house to my server as me the user so I could use it.  I am confused as to how to get a new user onto a specific user using emby connect.....if it is possible.

I really don't know what happened today because the one time my first server (beta) showed up in connect it would not allow me to connect and said it was unavailable but I could pull out my phone and open emby and connect to my server from their house no problem.

I just need a little direction here to what I am doing wrong as I want to go over there tomorrow and get this working so they can start using emby....but I want them connected to my new server with their own account so I can limit what they have access to.

Any idea what I was doing wrong here?

[Luke 42083]

HI, did you go through this process for each user?

https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001160340-emby-connect

[Ronstang 294]

OK,  I will do that but I could not connect with my own credentials and emby connect account so we will see what happens.  I know the server was active and connections were working because I could connect with my phone away from my house.  I was forced to manually enter the IP address and from experience this is not always reliable and at some point the user can no longer connect.....and I am dealing with people who won't be able to figure anything out so simple and reliable is better.

[ebr 16187]

9 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

from experience this is not always reliable and at some point the user can no longer connect

Is your public IP address changing often?

[Ronstang 294]

3 hours ago, ebr said:

Is your public IP address changing often?

Not often but it has changed on me and left my friend no way to connect....but it wasn't noticed because we were just testing it back then.  Now I'm finally ready to let this second server be shared all the time so I need it to connect reliably.

That being said, I did get emby connect to work this morning.  I created an emby connect account for my friends then added them on the system but it still wouldn't connect.  The problem turned out out to be the port forwarding.....which was the issue yesterday too obviously.  I had UPnP switched on in my router and the port mapper plugin installed and selected the auto port mapping in settings but my machines were still not able to be seen.  I had to go into the router and forward the specific ports manually.   No big deal as it's a one time thing.

Now my question is with the ports forwarded manually can I uninstall the port mapping plug in because recently it was overloading my logs so I uninstalled it when told to do so.  Do I leave UPnP on, off or does it not matter now that the ports are manually forwarded and working correctly?

[ebr 16187]

2 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

can I uninstall the port mapping plug

Yes.

 

3 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

Do I leave UPnP on, off

Should no longer matter (for us).

[GrimReaper 4749]

3 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

Now my question is with the ports forwarded manually can I uninstall the port mapping plug in because recently it was overloading my logs so I uninstalled it when told to do so.

Yes. Or only disable Automatic port mapping in Settings. 

3 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

Do I leave UPnP on, off or does it not matter now that the ports are manually forwarded and working correctly?

Depends if you have other services that utilise UPnP. If you disable Automatic port mapping/Uninstall Port Mapper plugin in Emby, as far as Emby is concerned UPnP settings of your router are irrelevant. 

Edited March 21, 2023 by GrimReaper
Cross-posted

[pwhodges 2012]

Leave uPnp in the router off unless you know you have a program using it - it is a security weakness.  Set up the port forwarding manually, turn off uPNP in the router and uninstall the Emby plugin.

Paul

Edited March 21, 2023 by pwhodges