NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
RBE971 / 12.1.10.12 NA: 224.0.0.0/24 multicast dropped on Wi-Fi, mDNS discovery broken
I've spent the better part of a week chasing this and I believe it's a firmware problem rather than anything at my end. Laying out what I found in case it's useful, and because there's a very similar...
andoverjd I tested this on my 971 with two 970 satellites running 12.1.11.151 (router), and 12.1.11.15 (970s), and I cannot reproduce the issue.
First I ran simultaneous-style mDNS packet-capture tests on two Macs, one wired and one on Wi-Fi, using tcpdump to capture UDP traffic destined for 224.0.0.251:5353. The wired Mac captured 70 packets during the test period, with 297 packets received by the filter and 0 dropped by the kernel. I then ran the same capture on the Wi-Fi Mac, which captured 77 mDNS packets, with 15,452 packets received by the filter and 0 dropped by the kernel. The wireless capture clearly showed multicast traffic from numerous other LAN devices, so 224.0.0.251 multicast is definitely reaching Wi-Fi clients on this firmware.
To make the wired-to-Wi-Fi direction definitive, I then did a controlled test. From the wired Mac I generated a UDP multicast packet explicitly bound to its Ethernet interface (en7, 192.168.1.106) and sent it to 224.0.0.251:53530 with the unique payload:
ORBI-MULTICAST-TEST-FROM-WIRED-M5
On the Wi-Fi Mac, tcpdump immediately captured:
192.168.1.106.51176 > 224.0.0.251.53530: UDP, length 33
including the exact payload:
ORBI-MULTICAST-TEST-FROM-WIRED-M5
That controlled test captured 1 packet, with 0 packets dropped by the kernel.
So on my RBE971/RBE970 system running 12.1.11.151, Ethernet-to-Wi-Fi forwarding of IPv4 multicast to 224.0.0.251 is working. This may suggest the issue was fixed somewhere between 12.1.10.12 and the 12.1.11.x branch, although of course it could also depend on some other configuration or topology difference.
The .151 update on 12.1.11.151 update to .15 is a minor unrelated fix I am testing, you might want to update to 12.1.11.15 and test: