SageTV and VLANs?

[farscapesg1]

Is anyone running SageTV on a home network segmented into VLANs? I was tinkering with my home network and decided to play around with doing some network segmentation, specifically segmenting off my wireless to a separate VLAN. I noticed when I did that, my one SageTV client using wifi could no longer see the server as a local connection and instead connected via the placeshifter port (no animated menu transitions for example). Curious, I switched a wired extender over to a different VLAN with the same result. I do have routing enabled between the VLANs, so I can ping the extenders on VLAN3 (for example) from devices on VLAN1 (where the server is currently) and if I connect a workstation to VLAN3 I can ping the server on VLAN1.

I'm assuming it is a multicast or UDP issue communicating across the VLANs, but was curious if anyone else had encountered it and had any guidance.

[reggie14]

It's probably not exactly a multicast issue. More likely Sage is just determining whether client/server are on the network based on the subnet. I don't know if there's some way to override Sage's settings. I'd be surprised if there is, though.

Out of curiosity, did you have to manually enter the IP/name of your Sage server on the extenders? I assume you'd have to do that for the extender to be able to find the server. That might be fixable if you used something like Avahi.

I set up a separate guest Wifi network on a separate VLAN, but I really don't need much communication between my systems and the guest systems. I did, however, want to allow wifi devices to control my Sonos system. I use pfsense, which has a Avahi plugin that allowed my guest wifi devices to be able to find the Sonos components. Most of the time...

But again, that's probably not your problem.

[Striker:WG]

time to revive an old thread!

reading the OP this is the exact same thing i'm doing. I'm tinkering with deploying VLAN's on my network and I want to have an IoT VLAN where i'll drop the smart TV's, Sage HD extenders, and other such things.

Sage server is running in a docker container on an Unraid server. Long term i'll be deploying Unraid to its own server VLAN, but it hasn't made the move yet.

I have a couple of PC based clients and they can connect to the sage server from their VLAN without issue. The HD200's on the other hand can't find the server when they scan for it and if I manually input the IP address, it tries to use Placeshifter instead of local lan playback.

Just wondering if the OP is still around and had any success or if anyone else has since navigated this territory with any success stories they can share?

Thanks!

[sacrament055]

I believe that's how the extenders work. If they're not on the same VLAN they assume they're remote and will act as placeshifters.

I would suspect the reason they aren't detected automatically is likely because the extender is sending out a broadcast to the local LAN looking for the server and since you're not on the same LAN you get no response.

Others can chime in but that's my understanding.

You might be down to having to keep them on the same VLAN if you want it to behave as a local extender.

[Foggy]

Thinking back (decades) into my networking career, I recall using proxy arp to fix similar issues. (see defn below) Not sure if proxy arp will fix this issue.
Does your LAN router have an option for proxy arp? Looks like my old Netgear can do it, but not my current ASUS.

Proxy ARP is a technique by which a proxy server on a given network answers the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) queries for an IP address that is not on that network. The proxy is aware of the location of the traffic's destination and offers its own MAC address as the (ostensibly final) destination.

[Striker:WG]

I'm running pfsense, and based on some Google searches, it does support a proxy ARP.

Time to go learn more about how it works and how to set it up.

Thanks for the tip!

[Striker:WG]

well, I tried setting up an Alias IP, a Proxy ARP, and an "Other". I ensured I had 1:1 NAT setup between the Virtual IP and the actual IP and a blanket firewall rule to allow all traffic from one VLAN to the other to ensure anything that could be routed would.

Still didn't work. Could use the VIP to do a placeshifter connection, but not a direct extender connection.

So I think I need to resign to either having my extenders on my server vlan or I need to install a second NIC in my Unraid box and allocate the Sage docker to use that second NIC and then that second NIC could be in the IoT VLAN.

[Striker:WG]

So after some additional digging, Unraid supports VLANs!

All that was needed, was to shut down my docker instances, update the network settings to enable access to the VLANs, then I was able to drop the Sage TV docker on the IoT VLAN (along with my various HD200/300 units), no extra NIC needed!

Huzzah!