UPDATE (31 August 2026): Maybe I misunderstood what the problem was with getting Plexamp to stream from my servers. I’m able to stream the music now even when I’m not on the household wifi network, so maybe I don’t need access to the router after all. (I think maybe my Plex server was just down at the time when I tried to test it.) That’s positive news. I’ve even set up a couple of small Plex servers for use in the classroom, assuming I can stream there, because I’d prefer to use that than to be dependent on whatever media player happens to be available on the classroom computer where I happen to be teaching a class. I’ll test that out on my office mac tomorrow and see how well it runs.
Meanwhile, I need to save my pennies and get a M.2 SSD drive for my Mac’s dock, because the Plex server data is starting to scale up with everything I’m adding to my servers, and I’d rather have the database on a separate drive than filling up my main hard drive. But that’s for the future, because at the moment, I’m a bit low on funds (for positive, adulting reasons, but all the same, I can’t afford to get a nice big M.2 drive at the moment).
ORIGINAL POST: This past week, I’ve been working on getting a functional Plex server up and running for my music collection. I considered using Jellyfin, but the problem is that I already have Plex working on our home’s Samsung TV (because I already have a friend sharing a Plex video server with me), whereas getting Jellyfin to work on our TV would involve putting the TV into some kind of developer mode and sideloading the app. I could do that, I guess, but it seems like kind of a bothersome pain in the ass. Meanwhile, Plex was included in the Samsung TV webstore, so it was easy to install the app on our TV and we don’t have to manually update it all the time.
In any case, I have a music server up, and it’s working… within the home wifi network, sort of. (It works on my phone and on laptops. It doesn’t work on the TV, though I’m not sure why.) However, my purpose is to get Plex streaming to my phone when I’m not home, so that I don’t need to keep loading different music tracks onto my phone. (As my son disparagingly commented, my phone’s internal drive is always, always full, and sometimes when I need to snap some pictures, I first have to delete a few albums.)
The problem with that is that our apartment has some kind of built-in router. Like, I don’t even know where the router is located. There is one—I was able to track down its IP address—but I don’t know where the physical router is. When we moved into the apartment, we were given a wifi password but no password for the router, so I’ve been unable to get into the admin panel and enable the stuff (like UPNP or NAT-PMP) that is necessary for streaming outside the home to work.
Personally, what I’m worried about is that it’ll turn out we’re on some kind of shared router, and that that we’re not allowed to adjust our router settings. This sort of thing would not at all surprise me, nor would it surprise me if it also turned out that the reason the person says it’s impossible is simply because they don’t know how to do it, and cannot be bothered to try find it. (That, I have to say, is an experience I have a lot when it comes to this sort of thing, not just in Korea, but I hit upon it far more often in Korea than back home.)
I guess we’ll have to make some calls on Monday. In the meantime, I’ll just have to be patient. I will say, I don’t like not having access to and control of our router. This is a case where a “modern convenience” is actually much more inconvenient and annoying, something I find is frequent if one’s needs go beyond the default. (Plus, I imagine in about another five years, the router’s going to be old and need updating, and nobody will know how to login and run the update software, and/or find where the routers in this building are located.