How to use BluOS apps on network without autodiscovery?

Beantwortet
Electrowolf

By doing quite some debugging I found that BluOS uses mDNS for its auto discovery and setup. (For some reason this is nowhere mentioned in the supplied documentation of BluOS. At least, when I search for things like "unable to connect to BluOS" I can't find anything related to mDNS.)

mDNS (and Bonjour) are multicast protocols. Unfortunately, some of my networks block multicast due to security reasons. I know the IP address of my BluOS device and I can connect to the webserver of the BluOS device from my phone or other device connected to the network. But as multicast is blocked, I can't seem to be able to connect the BlueOS app to my device.

Is there any way to connect the app to the device without having to rely on multicast?

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  • Offizieller Kommentar
    Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    Hi Electrowolf

    Like the vast majority of IoT devices, you will require mDNS enabled on your router. Please review your network documentation to prevent mDNS or Zero Conf traffic from being blocked.

    Multicast is not only used for setup and discovery, it is a requirement to perform multiple device broadcasts if you have multiple Players in your environment.

    Bluesound or BluOS Players will not work without Multicast

  • Electrowolf

    Hi Tony,

    Thanks for the reply, and sorry for being blunt in advance.

    Referring to other devices is in no way relevant to my question. Nor is the notion about multi-device setups or questions about the players.

    My questions is about the controller apps to control the players.

    Am I correct in understanding your reply as "BluOS apps can not control BluOS players without using multicast." and "Bluesound chooses not to implement an option to do so."?

    I state this second part of my question as your API documentation shows that a player is controlled by HTTP GET requests. As far as I can see, the only thing needed to be able to send these requests from an app is knowing the IP address of the player. At this moment this IP address is supplied by _musc._tcp through mDNS/Bonjour. I assume manually inputting the IP (+ port) in the controller app would do the same trick. As such adding this option to the apps seems to be simple.

    Hope you can shed some more light on this with an informative answer.

    Cheers,

    Electrowolf

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  • Tony W.
    Product Support Manager

    This is not an officially recommended nor officially supported use of our BluOS Players.

    -2
  • Ed

    @Electrowolf

    Seems like you have been given some incorrect information here.

    I recently purchased a PowerNode and, being a network engineer with a fairly complex home network setup, I was quite quickly looking to enable controller to player comms across layer 3 networks.

    I quick wireshark revealed mDNS usage for discovery; whilst there are methods to enable mDNS (multicast) traffic to traverse layer 3 networks, this is disabled in my networks for security reasons I won't go into...

    I was hopeful that perhaps once discovery was done, the controller would cache the IP address of the players; this would allow for the controller to be temporarily be connected to the same network as the players for discovery, and then moved back to its preferred network - this would be a suitable workaround in my case, however unfortunaltey the controller does not seem to cache the IP address.

    A quick bit of ProcMon digging lead to discovery of C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\BluOS Controller\staticPlayers.txt... This looked promising! I entered the IP address of my PowerNode into the text file and fired up the controller... No luck!

    To Google... Searching for "Bluesouds staticplayers.txt" yielded success in the form of THIS ARTICLE

    TLDR;

    If you add the following line into staticPlayers.txt, the contoller will connect to your player without the need for mDNS discovery at startup. Obviously, replace the IP address with the correct one for your players:

    192.168.0.1:11000,192.168.0.1:11010,192.168.0.1:11020,192.168.0.1:11030

    Hope this helps!

    2
  • Electrowolf

    Thanks Ed!

    That we are given incorrect information here is not a new thing unfortunately, so thanks for the heads up on the other documentation. 

    So far I have been able to reconfigure my network such that only the broadcasts from certain devices and/or types of broadcasts are allowed. This helps things in my case, but most consumer hardware doesn't have the options to do this. If it is a setting at all, it is usually all or nothing. So your information is great for people who can't do that ;-).

    Cheers,

    Electrowolf

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  • Matthew

    This is good information and encouraging the feature is available from the BluOS Controller app for Windows and MacOS X. Would it be possible to add this feature to the Android app as well to enable the Android app to also control players on other subnets?

     

    Thank you for the consideration.

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