Hey folks - I’ve been enjoying going from Roon novice to, well, slightly more than novice over the past few weeks. I quite like Roon’s interface and wide support of devices and have enjoyed reading up on this community.
Like many here in Tikering, I’ve got a strong desire to be able to use Roon across VLANs. One of the main reasons is that my LAN -the network my tablets, phones, and desktops/laptops use- is secured with 802.11x. That makes is pretty tricky to get a headless raspberry pi, for instance, on to the network. I have a separate Simi-secure LAN that uses WPA2 and my preference would be to put my streaming devices on my IOT network (separate VLAN, separate SSID).
My Roon server is on my LAN running on a Ubuntu box.
I understand the party line is that Roon is designed to only work on a single subnet.
My questions are: is that some kind of hardcoded limitation, or is it just a really complicated thing to work around? For instance, I’m sure there’s mDNS and broadcast traffic involved. I’ve tried forwarding mDNS between my subnets (something I’d enabled a long time ago for printers, etc). But I also tried proxying IGMP broadcast traffic between my LAN and IOT. When I did that, clients that were connected remained connected, but if I quit the app and re-launched it, they couldn’t connect.
So I guess what I’m asking is:
- Does anyone know the nerdy details about how Roon communicates and what network protocols and services it uses?
- Has anyone gotten creative about different subnets? For instance, I’ve read the threads on VPNs (something I’d also like to do) - anyone have any breakthroughs?
- Any other leads or ideas or creative approaches to different networks?