Remote Plex clients had no path in, for two measured reasons: Plex advertised
no remote connection at all (customConnections and ManualPortMappingMode both
ABSENT while PublishServerOnPlexOnlineKey=1), and its Service was ClusterIP, so
32400 had no off-cluster path. The L7 Gateway was NOT the problem -- it serves
Plex correctly (200, claimed=1, 401 on protected endpoints) -- but Plex clients
discover servers through plex.tv, not DNS, so an HTTPRoute cannot put this
server on a client's connection list.
Operator chose the native path over ADVERTISE_IP: Plex terminates its own TLS
with *.plex.direct and streams bypass the Envoy L7 hop.
Adds a hand-written non-catalog unit (the SD schema cannot express a
LoadBalancer Service or a pinned lbipam VIP), registered in render.py's
EXTRA_UNITS so --emit-waves places it in plex's own wave.
externalTrafficPolicy: Cluster, inheriting crafty's 8-day-outage lesson rather
than re-deriving it. Known consequence, documented: SNAT puts remote clients
inside ALLOWED_NETWORKS, so Plex meters them as LAN. Not an auth change.
Remote access does NOT work until the operator does two manual steps that
cannot live in this repo -- the WAN tcp/32400 forward and Plex's "manually
specify public port" toggle (no env var exists for it; verified NONE in the
image's init surface). runbooks/plex-remote-access.md is the procedure.
Touches clusters/** -- a sensitive path -- so the approval-policy stage will
block pending an operator /approve-override.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
