Tinkering with Pi and the Ubiquiti Travel Router

Tinkering
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So I’ve been fiddling around in the world of Ropieee (great system; huge props to Harry!) and built a Pi and touch screen unit to let me control music when my main computer setup is connected to my work laptop instead of my personal Mac Studio. It’s been great! Then I started wondering if I could use a Ubiquiti UTR to access my Roon server when I’m out and about in the world with the Pi/touch screen; i.e. turn it into a little portable Roon unit to reach home since we can’t use Roon Arc on laptops.

[for anyone who doesn’t know, the Ubiquiti Travel Router is a device that you can connect to the via ethernet or wifi away from your home network and that recreates one or more wifi networks in your current location; i.e. every device I own that autoconnects to “PhilsWifi” at home will automatically connect to the new “PhilsWifi” network anytime the UTR is connected and turned on as it’s an extension of the home network.]

When I’m out and about and connected to the UTR, I can get the Pi (or at this point my laptop running the Roon client) to see my ROCK and to control existing audio zones that are physically located in my home, but the ROCK can’t see my Pi or my laptop’s audio zones. Pi –> ROCK, but ROCK –>|| Pi.

At this point, I think it’s a subnet problem, as the UTR assigns addresses in the x.x.2.x subnet instead of the x.x.1.x subnet that the main router uses. I have rules set up so that devices on different subnets can see and talk to each other (that’s how the Pi can see the ROCK), but for whatever reason I can’t get the ROCK to see or connect to any endpoint connected via the UTR.

Anyone have any suggestions or explanations of why the ROCK can’t see anyhing on a different subnet than itself? Is this a software issue?

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It is designed that way, i.e., most home users, and ISP routers, only have a single subnet.

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That’s totally fair, but if it’s a design choice why can end points (and the Roon client!) see the ROCK on a different subnet? Just random?

(Just trying to figure out if there’s a fix for this; i.e. if it’s just a question of Roon using a different protocol to see endpoints vs. a client seeing the core.)

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There have been many related discussions over the years, most recently around using Tailscale in a similar way. Roon endpoint discovery uses multicast. By default, multicast does not cross subnets. It is possible to configure routers to propagate multicast packets across the subnets they manage, but it is not an out-of-the-box thing. I use UniFi gear on several sites, tried once (not very hard) to enable cross-site multicast, but failed.

1 Like
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Ah, that’s super helpful; I didn’t even know what I would need to try to address. May be I end up running into the same blocker you did, but might be worth spending some time banging my head against this particular wall.

Thanks!

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This may be relevant https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/14957610078615-UniFi-Gateway-IGMP-Proxy-IPTV