Hello everybody. I was absolutely thrilled to see that I would be able to connect Roon ARC to my roon server using Tailscale and therefore could get rid of port forwarding on my router which is just an unnecessary risk.
Here is what I don’t understand: when Tailscale is enabled (NAS as a subnet router and iPhone to access ARC or ROCK) I am able to access the roon server’s (ROCK on a NUC) “homepage” via browser and IP. Access, powering down, rebooting, everything works from outside my LAN.
But the Roon App won’t find the roon Rock server! I really don’t understand the difference, why it won’t show up on Roon app on the iPhone, when I can access roon ROCK via browser and IP. And even more mysterious: when I initially configured Tailscale, it worked, until it didn’t, which is a mystery because I never changed any settings.
I don’t think that would work either. Roon device discovery uses IP multicast, which does not traverse the Tailscale VPN (there’s extensive discussion of this on other Tailscale threads). Roon ARC connects to the Roon server via a specified IP address, and traffic then flows over Tailscale. But the standard Roon app, designed for the local network, relies on Roon’s multicast discovery, and so it can’t find the Roon server when it is away from the local network where the server resides.
Another interesting detail: When I am in my Wi-Fi and connect my roon App to the server And then switch off Wi-Fi on my phone and connect Tailscale, the Roon app stays connected to the server for a few minutes before it loses its connection again.
This is not a support case, I mean I don’t really need to connect to my roon app, when not at home. I don’t have a use case for that. This thread is only based on my curiosity, because I wasn’t able to explain the behavior.
Yes it can but getting it to work as an Audio zone as well is intermittent. I have managed to get it as zone many times but it will randomly disappear not to work again for a while. It seems how and when you do it affects it.
Currently at work on their WiFi Tailscale active so is roon app.
My theory: it will work while the Roon server and the endpoint know each other’s IP address/port assignments for their RAAT stream, maybe from when they were on the same subnet. As soon as either end “forgets” the other, IP multicast discovery has to be used, and it can’t work cross-subnet.
Yes I was thinking it was something to do with the random port assignment and at the point of starting it’s the same so sees the end point. Remotes work all the time though as they use different discovery.
