Every since I got my Veralite installed my network I’ve been having weird issues with some of my network AV devices. First is a Onkyo network reciever. It keeps changing sound mode on its own and I’m getting audio drop outs. My windows media center center I’m using in my bedroom is refusing to reconnect to my WMC server. Reboot and its fine, but it used to reconnect with no issues. I reboot my server everynight so they have to reconnect all the time.
Any ideas on why vera would be causing this? I haven’t specifically interfaced with them in the UI, though they did show up in a UPnP scan of my network.
Yes, if you search the forum you’ll find lots of people with this problem (just search for “onkyo”). It appears to be a UPnP problem made by a combination of a not-very-robust initialization routine in the Onkyo and/or messed up UPnP code in Vera.
Some people are double-NATting (putting Vera on its own router, plugged into your ‘main’ router), using VLANs/separate subnets since the UPnP multicast traffic doesn’t cross those, etc.
Others have had success disabling the UPnP somehow with Vera (turning off ‘auto discover devices on my network’, setting up port forwards/firewall to block the traffic, etc). I could not get any of those to work.
In the end, the fix for me was to block UPnP traffic to Vera using my router. It is not overly fancy D-Link DIR-632 @ ~$25, but I love that it has 8 wired ports. I have it flashed with DD-WRT, since the stock firmware is garbage and drops WiFi all the time. DD-WRT lets you easily stop Vera from talking to your Onkyo on the UPNP ports UDP1900 and TCP5000 with ‘Access Restrictions’. I have mine set up as shown in the attachment. Under the ‘Edit List of Clients’ button I put in the MAC address of my Vera unit. Vera can still get to the Internet, and I can access it easily from any devices on my LAN since it is all one router/subnet and HTTP/remote access ports are not blocked. Has worked perfectly ever since.
Doesn’t that just block it from the Internet? I mean that tab is “WAN Access” … I didn’t think it would block local LAN traffic. I’m running dd-wrt also, but didn’t actually try this.
Also, which client(s) did you apply this to? Vera, Onkyo, or ?
Good point, I didn’t actually pay attention to the “WAN Access” label of the tab, although it has been my experience that not everything in DD-WRT is ideally labelled. (e.g. it used to say “Allow” even though it meant “Filter”… http://www.dd-wrt.ca/wiki/index.php/Access_Restrictions)
I was really looking to do iptables filtering, which I believe this UI is just a front end for. From what I could gather by reading the docs, it applies restrictions to the specified client MAC regardless of whether the traffic is LAN or WAN.
In any case, I can confirm 100% that it works for me, and was easier than doing command-line iptables config in DD-WRT.
I only applied the filtering to Vera (nothing related to Onkyo). I block UDP 1900 and TCP 5000, and presumably this stops Vera from seeing any UPnP requests so it does not respond, and Onkyo continues merrily along with its no-so-robust initialization.