I've struggled to get consistent results on my WD MPP when using it without an internet connection. I bought the device mostly so that my kids could watch movies on their iPads in the car on family trips. Sometimes it would connect and work, sometimes it wouldn't find the server. I think i finally found a setup that allows me to use it without any connection to the internet.
- Do not "claim" the server. I found that this associated it to my plex account which meant every time my kids tried to connect via the iOS app, it would try to validate them against plex's servers, which it couldn't reach. This lead to timeouts and eventually "server not connected" errors. I have to caveat that i'm using Plex Home for my wife and kids accounts so maybe it would work if they were normal plex accounts.
- Turned off "Update my library automatically". I'm not sure what was going on but it would randomly detect some change to the filesystem and start scanning for changes, even though i hadn't made any changes. This affected performance of the in progress streams
- Generate video preview thumbnails and Generate chapter thumbnails are disabled. Not sure if it even could do this since it can't transcode media but i disabled nonetheless
- In the "List of networks that are allowed without auth" i have "192.168.60.1/255.255.255.0,192.168.1.1/255.255.255.0". The WD MPP gives out ip addresses in the 192.168.60.x range and my home router gives out 192.168.1.x. This allows my clients to connect without authenticating. When i didn't have this, i would get an error in iOS that said "Not authorized"
- In the iOS apps, i had to manually specify the server's ip address and port otherwise sometimes it would find the server and other times it would just say "Connecting" and then timeout. In the apps settings, under advanced, server connections, add an entry with the ip address being 192.168.60.1 and the port as 32400
- On iOS, don't try to change the user when connected to the WD MPP's wifi. It won't work. It needs an internet connection to verify the Plex Home user with Plex.
If anyone else has any hints for working with the WD MPP, feel free to add on.