Any recommended Proxy for mDNS on AR750?

DalPal · 2019-07-09T11:05:09.516Z

Can anyone pls recommend a library to install on a AR-750 that can be configured for mDNS (Bonjour etc.) proxy reflection? We are using this router to manage a subnet below the ISPs router but the users Apps are connecting to the ISP wifi and cannot discover the devices we want them to on our AR-750 controlled subnet.
I have read that avahi-daemon can be run to solve this by reflecting all mDNS messages across the network border, but on the AR-750? Or perhaps squid or tinyproxy, are they still well supported?
Thank you!

kyson-lok · 2019-07-10T10:56:40.160Z

OpenWRT have avahi-daemon ipk, you can try to install it on ar750. Can it work?

antikythera · 2019-07-12T01:38:51.164Z

You may find this useful: GitHub - IETF-Hackathon/mDNSResponder

I’m actually using the AR-750S to work on the dnssd proxy. I don’t know if the same packages will build for the AR-750, but if they don’t, it’s a simple matter to reconfigure.

DalPal · 2019-07-12T08:00:02.183Z

Thanks - we’re going to try during the next week.

DalPal · 2019-07-12T08:05:18.681Z

This looks really useful. Although reading it I wonder if we’re making this more complicated than it is. We don’t have the limitations of a larger network. In our, situation, we mightsimply bridge from the LAN (AR750 192.168.2.x) to the WAN (which is actually the ISP router LAN so still relatively private, usually 192.168.1.x). We’re trying to avoid any changes to the ISP router or client devices. Perhaps we do only need to bridge these networks, specifically the IGMP and mDNS messages. Any ideas?

antikythera · 2019-07-12T13:06:52.045Z

That’s been done. I think there’s a package—the homenet people from Cisco were working on it a couple of years ago. I haven’t had good luck with it—it works in some cases, but if for example you have a device that defends its hostname that happens to be connected to both sides of the router, bad things happen. That’s not the only issue, but it’s one of the more obvious ones.

mDNSResponder/dnssd-relay is not an ideal solution to the problem because mDNSResponder is rather large and does more than you need, but a more compact mdns implementation like the one that was being worked on for openwrt a while back could work with a smaller footprint.

What you might want to bear in mind is that as the network grows, multicast bridging gets less and less good. Multicast is not reliable, and it slows down the whole network when you use it, so if there is a lot of multicast traffic, all traffic is impacted. Also, each hop along the way multiplies the unreliability, so while for a single hop it might not be bad, if you have a couple of routers, as in a mesh configuration, it starts to get bad.

What I pointed you to is definitely useful, but not complete. This is why we’re working on it at the IETF hackathon. It will do what you want, but it could definitely be improved. We’re using the AR750S to prototype this—if you look at the Apple WWDC presentation on Wide Area Bonjour, it actually points to this page which suggests the AR750S for people to use for testing.

You can see the WWDC session here: Advances in Networking, Part 2 - WWDC19 - Videos - Apple Developer

DalPal · 2019-09-11T11:27:29.232Z

Thanks for the input. We’re still working on this problem - actually in the past weeks we’ve been working on other things trying to get towards this actual task. We’ll update this post with any progress we make.

Flexin · 2019-10-16T20:06:03.257Z

often need proxies for social networks. I found the pinterest proxy Will the proxy data be reliable?

DalPal · 2019-10-17T08:50:17.563Z

Al Smith has this very complete code for relaying SSDP and MDNS across networks.

GitHub

GitHub - alsmith/multicast-relay: Relay multicast and broadcast packets...

Relay multicast and broadcast packets between interfaces. - GitHub - alsmith/multicast-relay: Relay multicast and broadcast packets between interfaces.

You’ll need to install Python Lite and follow the readme file for OpenWRT.