Airport Express / iTunes Sharing / Bonjour vs Linksys Router

01 Jan 2008

I got an Airport Express for Christmas, so I can stream music to the kitchen or bedroom instead of carrying my ipod around with me. It works great, but has had me tearing my hair out for the last 3 hours!

Basically it works absolutely fine over the wireless network, but wasn't detected when I used the wired network (which is fatal as my main PC, the one with iTunes on it, doesn't have a wireless card!)

Turns out it is nothing to do with the wired network, but is caused by a bug in my router - The Linksys BEFSR41v4. For whatever reason, you have to enable WAN multicast filtering to get LAN multicasts - which Bonjour, including iTunes sharing and Airport Express discovery use - to work!

I'm very happy now! Unfortunately I haven't done any of the things I planned to this evening because of this... which means I now have to go make my bed so I have somewhere to sleep tonight!

Update (24 Feb 2009)

Ted Farley reports that this also affects his TrendNet "N" router and other devices using the same chipset vendor.

 

This blog post is archived. Comments are no longer available.