I have a NAS with Squeezebox Server installed on a small wired LAN with a PC and some other stuff. On this same LAN is Squeezebox 3 and, until recently, I was using this not only to play music directly but to bridge the small wired LAN to the wireless network on which the rest of the squeezeboxes sit. This wireless network is controlled by a combined DSL Router/AP which provides the Internet connection and is also the DHCP server.
I was having trouble when the devices on the wired LAN were set to use DHCP. These devices would usually get an address but the software in the wireless AP/Router would then complain they were not there, would run into trouble trying to set sticky IP - in some cases claiming an IP address clash which did not exist etc. Also port forwarding from the Internet to the LAN would not work. It seems this wireless AP/Router, like some others, keeps tabs on what is "connected" by listening on the network and matching MAC addresses. It also occasionally issues ARP probes. With the squeezebox acting as a bridge it seems the DHCP transaction is conducted with the real MAC addresses of the devices on the wired LAN but the normal data traffic is subject to MAC address translation, i.e. the squeezebox sends all the non-broadcast packets forwarded from the wired network to the wireless network with it's own MAC address and then ensures the replies come back correctly by acting as an ARP proxy and giving out its own MAC address as the destination for all the IP addresses on the wired LAN behind it. Presumably it must then use the destination IP in the packets received from the wireless network to route the packets either internally or out on the wired LAN to the correct MAC address. The net result of this is that the wireless AP/Router sees IP addresses which it issued to one MAC address via DHCP apparently in use with a different MAC address (the SB3's) and gets confused. In the end I had to replace the wireless bridging with a 200Mbit/s powerline Ethernet solution because the wireless is so busy round here I was getting lots of drop outs so I am not asking for a solution or workaround for the strange bridging behavior but thought I'd at least publish what I have discovered in case someone else runs into this issue. -- Fozzy ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fozzy's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8592 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=84556 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
