UMS access across routed subnets

[skydivinggeek]

Hi All,

I am designing a solution for a school to host their DVD collection at a single location. The school have 4 sites all connected with a IPSEC VPN (Mesh configuration) over gigabit fibre.

Each subnet has been allowed "Any to Any" firewall policies. So we have confirmed connectivity across schools.

So, can UMS handle access from remote subnets? And can UPNP discovery work across remote subnets?

If anyone has any advice or experience with this, I would be happy to hear from someone.

Regards,
Andy

[Nadahar]

The short answer is "no". This problem isn't really with UMS, but with UPnP. Communication between UMS and renderers takes place on "two levels": UDP uni and multicast for discovery and other information exchange, and HTTP (TCP) for requests and playback. The HTTP part obviously have no issues with routing, but you'll never get there since the renderers will never "find" UMS and they won't be able to exchange capacities etc.

Theoretically multicast routing is possible, but I've never attempted to do it. The routers/endpoints must support multicast routing.

[skydivinggeek]

Hi Nadahar,

thanks for the quick response, I have fortigates at my perimeter at all of my schools and some lovely layer 3 switching, so I am going to go down the multicast route.

I was thinking, this could be an interesting exercise. I will add a multicast network and route it. And see what happens.

Thanks!
Andy

quote=Nadahar post_id=38919 time=1549831164 user_id=4025]
The short answer is "no". This problem isn't really with UMS, but with UPnP. Communication between UMS and renderers takes place on "two levels": UDP uni and multicast for discovery and other information exchange, and HTTP (TCP) for requests and playback. The HTTP part obviously have no issues with routing, but you'll never get there since the renderers will never "find" UMS and they won't be able to exchange capacities etc.

Theoretically multicast routing is possible, but I've never attempted to do it. The routers/endpoints must support multicast routing.
[/quote]

[Nadahar]

I don't know FortiGate - I've primarily used CheckPoint FW-1/NGFW and pfSense. I don't think I've every used a layer 3 switch, I've always routed layer 3 through a trunk port, but then again I haven't really worked with networking for many years now.

I don't quite remember how the multicast routing is done now, but I'm sure it's not that complicated. There is one point to look out for though: As far as I remember, a multicast packet starts it's life with a given TTL value that is decreased each time it is routed. When this value reaches 0, the packet is dropped. That means that it can only traverse a limited number of subnets. The initial TTL value isn't configurable in UMS, and is set to some standard default that I don't remember. What I do remember is that it looked "very low" to me, so if your routed packages never gets where you want them, check the TTL (through some kind of packet inspection). Other than that I guess it's just a matter of figuring out the multicast addressing. All UPnP devices will listen to and send to IP 239.255.255.250, so you somehow have to make sure that any packages sent to this address is replicated to the other subnets.

It would be nice if you could get it to work, but it's not exactly my idea a fun

[skydivinggeek]

So - Im not going down the multicast route now. Too much hassle!

I discovered that the web interface on UMS and that will do the teachers nicely.

I configured UMS on a server at one school and have media on a NAS at a remote subnet and it works wonderfully.

I monitored the WAN usage and for 720P its about 20Mbps.

That will do it nicely. Problem solved!

Andy