Wifi versus mDNS

Installation and Getting Started
1

Still having trouble seeing the AmpliPi from my WiFi-connected mobile phone apps. I am not connecting via a guest-SSID, and I have tried turning off the 5GHz band for a while. I see the AmpliPi using an android network analysis app, but only if I ping its IP-address. Pinging amplipi.local does not work from the phone (via-WiFi).

I assume the AmpliPi mobile app (from the Google Play Store), uses mDNS lookup to find the AmpliPi. I have an Eero Pro mesh wifi network, which provides IP addresses that end in 192.168.7.xxx – so, maybe this creates an atypical wifi subnet?

I am told that mDNS does not broadcast properly through some vendors’ WiFi-routers, (because the broadcast creates too much overhead). Some folks recommend a third-party “bypass server”, or disabling a “filter”, or using a “sniffer”, but I have yet to figure out how to implement any of these techniques on the proprietary Eero app, (Eero-owners do not get normal web-app browser-access to their router-settings).

Will update if I, or someone smarter than me, discovers a solution.

1 Like
2

I am sorry you are still having trouble with this.

One thing that I would like to correct here is that AmpliPi does not host its own WiFi network, the hardware only has an Ethernet connection (note the CM3+ module we use does not have built in WiFi like many pis).

Also .local resolution does not work on android. More details here.

As for troubleshooting mDNS on the eero, I found the following thread, where an eero engineer responded, may be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/azyvf2/cannot_reliably_get_local_resolution_working/

We are working on being able to specify a IP-address/URL in the app and trying other automatic search methods to make this as painless as possible. See here for details.

3

SOLVED: AmplPi required a power cycle, which likely updated the mDNS records to make mDNS broadcast properly over the mesh-Wifi. I had also changed the DNS server to Cloudflare, from the default being my ISP, but I doubt that made any difference. I was all about the reboot. My AmpliPi mobile app (on Wifi) can now find the AmpliPi and it now works perfectly. Is this a bug, or can you just add a power cycle button to the PC web-app? Walking into a server closet, to unplug a rack-mounted AmpliPi, is not an intuitive solution to mNDS updates.

4

Awesome. We have been meaning to add a restart button! We’ll see if we can add that soon.

1 Like