Anyone using Roon ARC with AmpliFi HD router - weird behaviour

Roon Software Discussion
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I use an Amplifi HD router as my main router. When I installed Roon 2.0 it set itself up automatically, if I go to the Settings/Roon-ANC page for my main Roon Core it reports that everything is OK and shows the purple tick to say that Roon ARC is set up correctly. If I then go outside my home and try to access it over mobile data it works perfectly. But, here’s my issue…

As I understand it Roon is supposed to set up a port forwarding rule in my router using UPnP which I do have enabled but if I go into the Amplifi app on my iPhone and go and look at the port forwarding section it says that no port forwarding rules are defined yet it still works.

Have I misunderstood how all this works. Is it the case that if Roon can use UPnP then it doesn’t need to set up a port forwarding rule but if UPnP doesn’t work correctly then the user needs to go and set up a rule? I’ve never really looked into how UPnP works and had always assumed that it was a way for a sever process on the local side of a router to request a forwarding rule be set up without user intervention but that doesn’t seem to correspond to the behaviour I am seeing. Have I misunderstood (or maybe I should say mis-guessed) how UPnP works or is the AmpliFi reporting a bit buggy here?

If there are any other AmpliFi users here then can you see a port forwarding rule set up by Roon without you needing to do anything?

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The port forwarding rules section of the software will be for manually overriding firewall rules. It’s the same in my Unifi setup made by same people. UPnP will open it automatically it doesn’t need configuration.

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I use an Amplify Alien. I needed to set up a port forward.

I briefly tried uPNP - but not very hard.

I wouldn’t expect uPNP to set up an explicit rule that at you can view via the gui.

If it works, it works.

You can switch off uPNP and set up an explicit rule if you prefer.

Otherwise just enjoy!

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Thanks both of you. At least I now know this isn’t abnormal behaviour but I must confess that as a bit of a control freak I find it slightly unnerving to have UPnP opening routes through my firewall without record. I would be far more comfortable having some record of what is being done. I suppose my guess that UPnP auto-created rules that looked like manual rules so that they appeared as explicit port forwards was me projecting my wishes on the design.

I might try turning off UPnP and setting up an explicit rule although that might be opening up a world of pain since I have a fair amount of home automation stuff so who knows what I might break. Maybe a project for another day. Or maybe I should just read up on exactly how UPnP works and then maybe I might feel a bit less out of control (I do have a comp sci degree, albeit from way before UPnP was ever a thing, so I should be able to understand it; I hope).