Help - Wireless Bridging/iTunes Home Share

[jjscott]

I’m having a problem with the wireless to LAN bridging on my Sonicwall TZ-210W. Right now, the WLAN and LAN are bridged. For the most part, everything works fine. Wireless clients receive an IP that is on the same subnet as the LAN resources and I can access all these resources without an issue.

The problem comes into play with iTunes Home Sharing. I have a NAS that contains all of my music and it is hardwired to my Sonicwall router. When my laptop is hardwired to the router, everything is fine. The NAS shows up in the left pane of iTunes under the Shared entry and I can access and play all of my music. However, once I connect wirelessly, the Home Share entry is gone. This happens on both of my laptops – Dell with Windows 7 & HP with Windows XP. Windows Firewall is disabled and I disabled my Norton firewall. Same issue.

I have an old Linksys WRT-54GX router that is configured as an Access Point and hardwired to the Sonicwall. If I establish a wireless connection from either laptop to the Linksys, the iTunes Home Share works. If I remove the Sonicwall from my network and replace it with the Linksys, everything works.

I know that Apple uses TCP 3689 & UDP 5353 ports for Home Sharing so I’m guessing the Sonicwall is not allowing them through the bridge??

The Sonicwall is different from my Linksys in that it establishes one network for the LAN and one for the WLAN. When I first installed it, the LAN IP was 192.168.1.x and the WLAN was 172.31.1.x. This caused connectivity issues since the two networks were on separate subnets. I called Sonicwall and they configured the router to bridge the two networks and everything was fine, or so I thought. There’s still a missing piece here with certain traffic not making it through the bridge.

I spent 1.5 hrs with a tech from Sonicwall remoted into my system today and he couldn’t figure it out.

Any ideas here?

 

[stevech]

Since you're not a Sonic Wall guru: Simplify the system?
Remove the Sonic Wall and use a commonplace WiFi router?

 

[jjscott]

This is not an option.

 

[stevech]

well, if neither you or a SonicWall tech cannot determine how to achieve your goal, then what?

Having two subnets, one for wired, one for WiFi - seems like the default setting in the thing would be to have a static route table entry for the two subnets applicable to all ports.

 

[jjscott]

well, if neither you or a SonicWall tech cannot determine how to achieve your goal, then what?

Having two subnets, one for wired, one for WiFi - seems like the default setting in the thing would be to have a static route table entry for the two subnets applicable to all ports.

Persistance. I figured it out. I found that Multicasting is required for Apple products and applications and it was disabled on the router for WLAN to LAN. Once I enabled it and added a firewall rule for WLAN > LAN traffic, everything was golden.

 

[stevech]

good detective work!
Multicasting requires every router in the path to cooperate/support.

Now send the bill to Sonic Wall's tech support.

 

[jjscott]

Thanks. I understand why they separate the wireless and lan networks on the same router, but I would have thought that when you configure the router to bridge the two internal networks that it would bridge everything and not require you to manuall enable certain protocols. Lesson learned with Sonicwall.

A question for you, does enabling Multicast support pose any security risks that a hacker could expolite?

Right now, I have Multicast configured for WLAN & LAN. It is disabled for WAN. I'm not sure why WAN would be an option since Multicast is a connectionless protocol and therefore, non-routable. Right??