Remote control from another LAN

Support
1

Hi,

I am new to ROON and I am in my first day of the trial period.

My setup is as follows: I have two houses: house1 and house2. Both houses are connected via an IPSEC site-tosite connection, with the result that each has a different lan subnet, but all inter-house traffic is being routed without problems.

My music collection is within a NAS (ASUSTOR) in house1. For the trial I have set up roon on an iMac, accessing the NAS. This iMac is in house1. With this set up I can play music in house1, and access the server from other computers without issues (well, except when apparently the roon server seems to go to sleep… but that seems to be another issue)

I have configured by squeezelite systems in house2 to point to the Roon server in house1: they find the server, and I can find them registered in the Roon server. Music reproduction works fine (I am listening to it right now)

However, I cannot connect a remote in house2 to the server sitting in house1. I manually introduce the IP address of the server, but to no avail…

I do not know how networking for the remotes is set up, but I fail to understand why squeezelite clients can connect wihtout issue, but client remotes cannot.

Previous to trying roon I had a LMS on the Asustor NAS and was able to access my music collection without any problems.

Could you point me to something I could do to overcome this problem?

Regards

2

OK,

a quick update.

Yesterday, suddenly my remote clients (iPad and OSX) have been able to connecto to the Roon server. The conclussion is that the process takes a long time initially until they somehow get paired…

If I had some more information about how the remote–server interaction works I could venture some valid hypothesis about why I have observed what I saw.

ONE NOTE though. Even though the remote has paired to the server, the player of the remote is not available for music reproduction. If I had some more information about how the protocols are set up (another level of detail in the architecture explanation) I could try to address this.

1 Like
3

Jose,

Which player? The iPad will not play, it’s used as a remote control only.

4

The one I understand comes with the OSX remote client, giving access to the system’s sound on my macbook pro

5

Last time the subject was discussed in May, all Roon points had to be on the same subnet.

Given that the audio transport was changed in version 1.2, this may be old information. However, @danny can probably speak to your specific case/question.

6

Yes, you are right, I have seen this later.
Thank you for pointing it out anyways.

This is probably a result of them using some sort of multicat, which does not travel to the other lan. Just guessing.

It would be interesting to know some extra details about the protocols/ports that are being used, so that one could configure networking gear to overcome this kind of limitation.

I know my setup may be unusual in a home setting, but simmilar issues would appear in roamming scenarios, or in settings (schools, etc…) where different lans are more likely to be found.

In any case, yes, it would be interesting to know what someone from the team, like @danny, could say about this.

7

Hello Josep,

@Brian posted this, it was before well before RAAT was launched but I believe it it still relevant.

8

Hi Carl,

thanks for the pointer to the topic.

I read through that conversation and it might prove useful.

Although I am afraid the topology of the network in that case is not the same as in my case, when I get some time I will check to see if simply forwarding packets on the UDP port works for me (I am assuming the ports have not changed)

9

Hey @Josep – thanks for the detailed descriptions of your setup. Right now, Roon isn’t designed for streaming to multiple locations, and is designed with a home network in mind.

Connecting your Roon library to multiple locations is absolutely on our roadmap and is something we intend to implement in the future, but for now multiple locations are not something we support yet.

Thanks for the question @Josep!

10

Hi @mike,

I did some testing today in a similar environment (but more controlled): two vlans going through a router.

I placed the iMac with the Roon Core on a separate VLAN by itself, and the rest of the home network stayed on the same VLAN.

This time I set up an IGMP proxy at the router, linking both VLANs, with the VLAN having the Roon core in the downstream.

With this configuration, the roon client/remote’s multicast packets make it to the VLAN with the Roon Core, thus the remote discovered the server and, furthermore, the server recognized the local player, and could play music on it.

With this setup, however, the roon core lost sight of the Airplay server in my receiver. So I went to fix that too.

The fix also required configuring the router, placing a mdns reflector on it, in charge of shipping mdns packets between the vlans. After this, the Roon core could detect the Airplay server, however it was not able to play music on it.

After trying several approaches, I decided to test if the iMac with the roon Core could ship audio to the Airplay server (without Roon). The result is that IT COULD ship audio to Airplay. So. I suspect that your implementation of Airplay must be lacking something (or making some sort of assumptions) about the discovery responses from the Airplay server…

I have seen the mDNS response packets from the Airplay server being received by the Roon Core machine, however Roon does not seem to make use of its contents in an appropriate way.

The only thing I can think of to explain this behavior is that Roon may be taking the IP address sending the mDNS response as the IP of the Airplay server, and this is not the case now, as those packets show the IP of the router, which is running the mDNS reflector. Of course, I could be totally wrong, as I did not have that much time to analyze the network traffic, and do not fully understand how Airplay works…

In sum, I think I resolved my original problem, but I discovered another one (the Airplay issue) that I do not know how to solve…

If there is interest I can give some details of my configurations, although they are dependant on the router I am using a ERLite from Ubiquiti)

Regards

1 Like
11

Wow, I am very impressed. You nailed it. We have this fixed and it is awaiting release. Next public build…

What’s your background? Networking ops or developer?

2 Likes
12

@danny

That is great to know!
Thanks! (it saves me having to find out how to fake mDNS response packets, just to configure the Airplay devices)

As for my background, yes, I would say I fit the description of a systems developer/architect

13

Hi Roon Labs team,

What is the status of this fix? I have a similar setup where my LAN (192.168.1.0/24) and WLAN (192.168.2.0/24) are on different subnets and my wireless clients couldn’t discover my Roon Server (running on the LAN subnet). After adding an IGMP proxy on my gateway similar to @Josep my wireless clients were able to discover the Roon server. Like him, my wireless Airplay devices show up as available output targets however all of them show the router’s LAN IP address of 192.168.1.1 instead of their actual address. Needless to say, no playback.

Did this fix ever actually make it in?

Roon Server: RoonServer v1.2 (build 165) stable on linuxx64
Airplay Targets: Apple TV 4 (tvOS 10.2)

14

I’ll leave a tag for @Danny to follow up with you.

15

@Carl Thank you!