I want to use my PIA VPN connection for all my day-to-day activity, browsing the internet, downloading files via torrent/ftp and streaming from various sites (YouTube, Netflix, espnplayer) but at the same time I want to have a Plex Media Sever running that allows me to watch my private collection while commuting to work and for the weekends that I'm away from home.
I have been searching for a simple quick fix for this problem for a while now and while there is a lot of people trying to get it to work using port forwarding, iptables and static route rules, it never seems to work well, if at-all.
I have found a solution that fits my needs perfectly, it might not work for everybody, but it works for me.
I am running Ubuntu 15.10 64-bit server edition installed on a SSD RAID 1 array. Using the GNOME interface. On this server I have configured the PIA VPN and it works flawlessly. (Note: I am using the gnome-network-manager not the PIA Linux app.)
I use Filezilla for FTP/SFTP and using PIA port forwarding I have rtorrent/rutorrent working very well.
Then using the Oracle VM VirtualBox I created a virtual Ubuntu 15.10 64-bit desktop and installed Plex Media Server on it.
I used VirtualBox's built-in folder sharing to share the drives that hold my collection. Due to the way that VirtualBox mounts the shared folders, I did have some problems with permissions, but as it is a virtual machine, I just allowed Plex Media Server to run as root. (This is not the perfect solution, but it solved my permissions problem.)
Using a Bridged network connection back to my main NIC it connects to the internet using my ISP's IP and thus bypassing the PIA VPN altogether.
So now I have a fully working, remote accessible Plex Media Server while having the security of the PIA VPN service for the rest of my digital needs.