AirPlay from Main Network to Guest Network

[degnared]

Hi, I am trying to set up my smart devices on a guest network, which includes devices like my smart TV and Sonos speakers. However, my devices on the main network are not able to AirPlay to my TV, even though they can ping the TV.

I'm using a RT-AX88U as my main router (and has Merlin installed), and my TV is connected on a guest network on Yazfi.
I've been cracking my head over this for the past few weeks to no avail, any help is greatly appreciated!

 

[bennor]

How do you have YazFi configured? Have you tried enabling "Two way to guest" for the relevant YazFi guest network? You may have to look into using the firewall scripting capability of YazFi to allow access to the main LAN from YazFi Guest Network clients.
https://github.com/jackyaz/YazFi/#custom-firewall-rules
Example of how to setup custom firewall scripts for YazFi to allow access to or from specific YazFi clients and LAN clients.
https://www.snbforums.com/threads/allowing-access-to-selected-network-devices.80405/#post-784521

 

[degnared]

I had "Two way to guest" disabled cos I thought that would mean that the devices on the guest network can also access other devices on the main network – would that be true?
I did try enabling it to test (haven't tried setting up custom firewall rules yet), but it still doesn't allow me to connect yet.

 

[bennor]

If you want devices on the Guest Network to access main LAN devices then you have to open up paths for them to do so. You have some options, either move the Guest Network device main LAN, or you have to open up paths between the Guest Network and the LAN using scripting. If YazFi "Two way to guest" didn't work then you likely will have to use the scripting feature(s) indicated in the links I posted. You may need to find and use the specific ports for AirPlay when creating those scripts.

 

[degnared]

I see. Let me doing that, will see if I need help again, thanks for your help thus far!

 

[drinkingbird]

Hi, I am trying to set up my smart devices on a guest network, which includes devices like my smart TV and Sonos speakers. However, my devices on the main network are not able to AirPlay to my TV, even though they can ping the TV.

I'm using a RT-AX88U as my main router (and has Merlin installed), and my TV is connected on a guest network on Yazfi.
I've been cracking my head over this for the past few weeks to no avail, any help is greatly appreciated!

Airplay probably relies on UDP and possibly even multicast. Multicast won't work between them. UDP in theory should but you may have to look at the Yazfi firewall rules and also whether airplay also needs two-way TCP communication in order to establish and maintain the stream.

If enabling "two way to guest" makes it work, then you either have to leave it that way, or get into scripting so you can limit the firewall rules to a strict set of ports/IPs/etc. Leaving "two way to guest" enabled sort of defeats some of the purpose of having the guest in the first place. Still a bit more secure, but not much.

I think yazfi also lets you choose specific IPs to allow communication with? That is an option, maybe restrict it to only your phone or whatever devices need to airplay. But again, that may end up just defeating the purpose, where scripting some firewall rules would better let you filter only what is needed.

EDIT - sorry looks like you've already tested that. It sounds like there may be multicast involved (which won't route between guest networks and LAN using Yazfi), or possibly some other protocol that yazfi is blocking.

Another thing to test, try enabling two way to guest and disabling "client isolation" if you have that enabled. If it starts working now, you can try re-enabling one-way to guest but leaving client isolation disabled and see if that works.

If all else fails, one option is to just keep the guest network in the devices you typically airplay from (not active, just programmed in) and switch to it when you need to airplay. You'll still need to make sure client isolation is disabled on that guest network.

 

[sfx2000]

Bonjour/Avahi is intended to be on a single subnet, but it can be extended...

Good info here...

https://www.vivitek.eu/Download/Documents/Enabling_iOS_Mirroring_in_a_Multiple-subnet_Environment.pdf

On AsusWRT-RMerlin - might have to add entware, as the Avahi implementation is missing libnss-mdns, which is in entware, and you'll have to modify the avahi-config files appropriately for the subnets and interfaces...