Hi, I am trying to connect to Roon via VPN from my iPad. The vpn is working as I can connect to my network devices - eg RDP into Windows pc’s, access my NAS via web browser on address 192.168.1.xxx. However, when I start The Roon app on my iPad, it does not finds my Roon Core/server. Roon core/server is running on a windows 10 machine with IP 192.168.1.yyy and I can also RDP into that machine.
Any advice on what I can do to fix?
Thank you, Hammer
Roon does not officially support VPN.
Do others have it working?
First check that your router is supplying an address in the same subnet as your Roon server. Many current routers will put VPN connections in a seperate /24.
You can sometimes get around this by adding a static router between the subjects but this is not ideal in terms of security.
However, if you’re away from home connecting on your iPad successfully via VPN there’s not much to do other than browse your library. It can’t act as an endpoint to stream audio.
Some have reported gotten it to work. If you search the forums you will find many threads on teh topic.
I just open a Splashtop window to my home computer and run Roon on the home computer.
Thanks…I was hoping to stream music to my iPad when I am away from home. Besides bandwidth issues, why wouldn’t that work if via vpn, the iPad is on my home network?
Nothing to do with VPN. Because due to issues with iOS, Roon cannot stream to any iOS device. No iPhone, No iPad. However, Android has no such limitations and works fine.
I just setup a VPN server on a macmini (MacOS 10.12.3) running MacOS Server and I have yet to get outside the house and try it but at least its opened up the ports on my airport from the server app and its using the same subnet etc for everything.
EDIT…
Well I can connect and get an IP address on the network. Screen sharing and MRD work fine IP based connections but roon won’t
I really had hopes it might work for my mac to stream from VPN but it can’t find the core
But what exactly is the limitation about?
Ok, I understand that this might be something different.
But e.g. the Synology app (DS Audio) for IOS is able to stream from my home network to my iPhone at any place. So should be possible somewhow…
Using OpenVPN, I can’t get Roon to attempt to use the NIC/Route of the OpenVPN vNIC. Watching WireShark shows Roon attempting to find my home Roon Core by sending UDP from my primary NIC on my non-VPN network segment.
Routes are properly configured. I would guess if I subverted all routing over OpenVPN (including default route) this might work, but I wouldn’t be able to access my ‘work’ network segment as needed when in the office.
If i find a way to hack this I’ll update the thread.
Im pretty sure JRiver works over WAN VPN too
I think you are really asking two questions:
(1). How can I VPN in to my home Roon Server.
Answer, at the moment Roon does not support this. Some other users may have gotten something running and they might be able to offer insight.
(2). Can I play music from Roon on my iOS device, iPad or iPhone.
Answer, at the moment Roon does not stream music to iOS devices. This is due to issues with Apple’s OS, the framework Roon uses and some other issues. There are several threads detailing this if you care to search, here is one example:
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-2-feedback-thread/9463/5?u=rugby
Thank you Daniel,
I did not find this issue in the feedback thread you linked at under 2).
But this is an understandable reason.
VPN probably would not be an issue for me, because I already was successful when trying ist.
I have a Fritz!Box and its VPN is working fine with Roon.
Without being able to use the iPhone as an playback device, I just do not have a use case for VPN at the moment.
We will see, what will happen 
Except you can use iOS as a playback device now. It’s a new feature in 1.4. So if VPN is working we just need to identify why Roon won’t connect across it. I suspect it will be a port forwarding rule combined with a manual server entry on the client - possibly the discovery protocol could be made to work also but it’s secondary. I will have a go at this some time soon as it gets around the lack of Roon mobile capability while I’m on wifi.
iOS and Android don’t allow bridge based VPN like OpenVPN TAP. Regular VPN creates a different network segment and routes data between, the server endpoint discovery won’t traverse across network segments.
Yep, was on mobile device before so couldn’t search so easily, I now understand it’s a broadcast RAAT connection from the server to the iOS device which won’t work across VPN. So it’s a dead duck and we wait for mobile support. The unfortunate part about this is that it means homes with multiple subnets (i.e. WiFi on a different subnet) won’t work either. I used to have mine like this and had to change it solely for Roon. Would have preferred not to for security reasons, but oh well.
When using OpenVPN it works fine (both for access to the the Roon Server as well as streaming music), but you have to ensure to use TAP mode (bridging mode). It won’t work using TUN mode (routing mode).
Unfortunately iOS does not support TAP, so you can’t simply VPN from your iOS device. However if you got a laptop or some other non-iOS device you should be able to setup vpn with TAP mode.
I was able to get streaming to work on my iPhone from remote (foreign Wifi and LTE) using SoftEther (free) largely following this link: https://linuxconfig.org/setting-up-softether-vpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04-xenial-xerus-linux
On the iOS side, nothing is needed but the built-in L2TP client. I am presently on 11.2.5 iOS, however, I recall the L2TP client having been available on iOS for a very long time.
Caveat: I do systems for a living and I already had a Linux VPN/router that I was running OpenVPN (not needed, but a things like IP forward were already on, etc.), so a lot of the groundwork was already laid.
If there is sufficient interest here, I will write a mini howto, but I’d only be versed in the Linux (non-GUI) variant.
Interesting, is SoftEther allowing the iPhone to bridge to your network or is it doing something special with the broadcast data from Roon Core?
I would have to dig deeper into L2TP to answer that question. It definitely streams data from my home Roon core over LTE (wifi off) to my iPhone, however.
I’m guessing the OpenVPN limitation is in the TAP driver they rely on for bridging, and not so much iOS itself; just a guess, however.