Hi @Peter_Gallagher,
I noticed you’re a Starlink user, so your perception of a gray area around official support for VPNs with ARC is totally understandable. Here’s the situation and what the team can offer to help out:
Starlink offers their their users an IPv4 external address with carrier-grade network address translation (CG-NAT). CG-NAT won’t work with ARC, which has forced the majority of users to rely on VPNs such as TailScale over in #tinkering.
The majority of Starlink users also have an external IPv6 address - in simple network setups and with proper prefix delegation on the part of the ISP, ARC will function on an IPv6 network. However, Starlink’s implementation is not playing well with Roon at the moment, and we have an open ticket to investigate. See here: Starlink IPV6 Roon ARC and here: ARC With Starlink & Ubiquiti UniFi Dream Machine [Roon Investigating]
The diagnostics you’ve presented suggest that your VPN is presenting an external address to the Roon Core, but that the request to ARC times out before reaching your phone. While we don’t officially support VPNs, given the circumstances with Starlink, I have a few suggestions:
- Verify whether the VPN has any ports it has reserved and make sure that the port assignment in Roon → Settings → ARC isn’t among them
- I’d make sure your router similarly hasn’t changed port reservations due to an automatic update
- Try a different VPN.
- Keep an eye on the Starlink threads above, as the team is investigating this issue actively. Note that if we determine the problem is with Starlink, our hands are tied, but we are determined to help Starlink users gain access to ARC out-of-the-box and on-the-go.