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!
Comments
1. Karl
Thank you!! Worked like a charm and is the only accurate answer on the web that I can find.
Posted on 29th January 2009 at 3:52pm.
2. Ted Farley
Thanks for your quality summary of the issue and solution.
I had the same exact problem with my new TrendNet “N” router. The default settings seem to inappropriately squash any kind of LAN ZeroConf communications, including Bonjour.
I couldn’t find any devices on my wireless LAN until I opened up WAN multicast. It seems like a serious bug that has made it into a lot of devices using the same chipset vendor. This bug should have been caught in testing. Ya know, like: “Does LAN Multicast work? Y/N”.
>99% of the customers out there will never identify the problem being related to Bonjour. And even fewer will recognize that their router vendor holds all the blame.
Posted on 24th February 2009 at 6:26pm.
3. Eric
I replaced my router and suddently my itunes sharing stopped so I knew it had to be the router, but for days couldn’t figure it out. this nailed it. thank you!
Posted on 21st September 2009 at 3:10am.