Dear Enno
We never met in person: I’m Stefan - an enthusiastic Roon customer - trying to help users get arround networking problems related to ARC.
The following post (see my comment within the post below) hopefully landed also on your desk.
Roon users are mostly overwhelmed about the required networking skills they would need. I personally (as an Engineer working for a big tear mobile operator) believe, the connectivity architecture choosen for ARC is not suitable at all for the majority of your users. Hence, the setup experience might destroy the good functionality of ARC in all respective domains. A kind of sxxx-storm is for me foreseeable at the horizon.
Don’t you think, Roon should stand-up and stop the mess around ARC?
To give you a bit of high-level perspective on the ARC connectivity miss-conception:
(1) ARC connectivity setup based on UPnP: many users (including me) don’t trust the choosen implementation on their router and hence, disabled this function;
(2) ARC connectivity setup based on automatic Portmapping: many legacy routers (equipment provided by the ISP to their customers) do not support this;
(3) ARC connectivity setup behind a double NAT calls for port-forwarding rules in routers and/or firewalls. Evenmore, Roon recommends (I guess due to simplicity) to put one device in bridge mode, which may cause troubles on services others than Roon such as IP-TV etc.
Out if this hurdles, some Roon users start to place the core into their DMZ, which is, frankly speeking, super-stupid and very un-secure.
If you want simplicity and security, a solution where the core establishes a steady secure tunnel to your infrastructure might be the way to go. However, this will be at expense on your datacenter side.
Kind regards
Stefan