Creating a firewalld service for Plex Media Server

I recently rebuilt my Plex Media Server box as a CentOS 7 VM running on Hyper-V on a Windows Server 2012 setup.

When I installed the rpm and started the service I found that I was unable to load the interface on my desktop. I knew that it was running because I installed netstat and I was able to see the port was open for traffic and I was also able to load the interface locally in lynx on the server.

UPDATE: At some point I rebuilt my server and I came back to this post to grab my config.  It turns out that I had a typo in one place and a missing command in another.  I have edited this post to correct the issues.  I have followed the new steps on several machines and this process does work without adding additional files in:
[code]/usr/lib/firewalld/services/[/code]
It turns out that there were two issues:

1. SELinux
2. firewalld

Disabling SELinux was as simple as editing the configuration file (/etc/selinux/config) and setting the value of selinux to disabled.

Dealing with firewalld was also initially simple as well:

[code language=”bash”]# systemctl stop firewalld[/code]

The problem with this approach is that I was completely disabling my server’s software firewall. The proper approach would be to create a ruleset that allows for the various ports of Plex Media Server to be open in my server’s active firewalld zone.

Fortunately this is relatively easy to accomplish:

1. Create the new service configuration file in the services directory
   [code language=”bash”]# vi /etc/firewalld/services/plexmediaserver.xml[/code]
2. Next add the ruleset using the XML format established for firewalld rules[code language=”xml”]
   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <service version="1.0">
   <short>plexmediaserver</short>
   <description>Plex TV Media Server</description>
   <port port="32400" protocol="tcp" />
   <port port="1900" protocol="udp" />
   <port port="3005" protocol="tcp" />
   <port port="5353" protocol="udp" />
   <port port="8324" protocol="tcp" />
   <port port="32410" protocol="udp"/>
   <port port="32412" protocol="udp"/>
   <port port="32413" protocol="udp"/>
   <port port="32414" protocol="udp"/>
   <port port="32469" protocol="tcp"/>
   </service>
   [/code]
3. Save the service file
4. Reload the firewalld configs
   [code language=”bash”]# firewall-cmd –reload
   success[/code]
5. Add the service to your active zone (by default it is the public zone, but I have changed my default zone to be the home zone)
6. [code language=”bash”]# firewall-cmd –permanent –zone=public –add-service=plexmediaserver
   success[/code]
7. Restart the firewalld service[code language=”bash”]# systemctl restart firewalld.service[/code]
8. You can get the defined service list from firewalld as follows:
   [code language=”bash”]# firewall-cmd –get-services
   RH-Satellite-6 amanda-client bacula bacula-client dhcp dhcpv6 dhcpv6-client dns freeipa-ldap freeipa-ldaps freeipa-replication ftp high-availability http https imaps ipp ipp-client ipsec iscsi-target kerberos kpasswd ldap ldaps libvirt libvirt-tls mdns mountd ms-wbt mysql nfs ntp openvpn plexmediaserver pmcd pmproxy pmwebapi pmwebapis pop3s postgresql proxy-dhcp radius rpc-bind rsyncd samba samba-client smtp ssh telnet tftp tftp-client transmission-client vdsm vnc-server wbem-https[/code]

Now that this is done you should be able to hit the Plex Media Server web interface from a web browser on any other machine in your network.