ARC Port Forwarding Steps: BT Home Hub 5 with Asus ZenWiFi AX

Getting Roon ARC to work for my setup has been quite an arduous and time-consuming process. I’m hugely grateful to all those who have helped me along the way. Now that my system is up and running, I thought it might be useful for others out there who may still be struggling if I summarised my setup and the settings I’ve used to resolve things.

Let’s begin with the overall configuration:

  • Broadband → BT Home Hub 5 → Asus ZenWiFi AX
  • My network is “managed” by the Asus, ie wireless is disabled on the BT router and the only connection out of the router is to the Asus. This is critical to avoid a massive security hole when DMZ on the Home Hub is enabled, which it needed to be.

BT Home Hub 5 settings:

  • Home Network/IP Addresses – DHCP Server enabled
  • Firewall/Port Forwarding – Game or Application: Roon (created); Device: Asus ZenWiFi (MAC address selected from drop-down menu). Here is a page that explains how to do this.
  • Firewall/UPnP – off
  • FIrewall/DMZ – enabled; Device IP address assigned to DMZ: Asus ZenWiFi (MAC address selected from drop-down menu)
  • Firewall/Configuration – Default

Asus ZenWiFi AX settings:

  • Wireless/General – Enable Smart Connect: on
  • LAN/DHCP Server – enabled
  • WAN/Virtual Server/Port Forwarding – Profile added for Roon with External Port and Internal Port both set to match the one identified on the settings page in Roon for Roon ARC; Internal IP address set to match the one identified on the settings page in Roon for Roon ARC; Protocol set to Both
  • WAN/DMZ – disabled
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