Bonjour Gateway, who's using what?

[corbinmharris]

Bonjour Gateway, who's using what?

Working with our network team to resolve Apple Airplay issues with the AppleTV on multiple VLAN's.

Just want to find out if anyone has added a Bonjour Gateway to their network and what devices were deployed. We have older Aruba 650's and trying to determine if they can be upgrade to support Aruba AirGroup for a Bonjour Gateway.

Thanks!

Corbin

[gburgess]

I can't say much for Aruba networks. Were were/are using Bonjour Gateway on our Ruckus network. We've had to make some adjustments through the past year. I have about 130-150 deployed out on the network.

That being said....I'm only able to really use about 80-90 of the Apple TV's this way currently. We saw in the beginning of the school year that it was working, but as we progressed a month in there were issues. Connections were not able to happen...and if they did, they would cut out sporadically. This led to us taking a VLAN off of the gateway. Later in the year, I added 1 or 2 more Apple TV's to a VLAN....same issues happened and we had to take another VLAN off.

I'm now in the process of updating teacher machines to 10.10 and testing the bluetooth connection against the gateway connection. So far, switching over to bluetooth has worked well for the select teachers I've been testing with.

[Chris_Hafner]

I'll have to look into this. We're using AirGroup on relatively new Aruba equipment. So far, we still experience drops with AppleTVs. Apples Engineers aren't very helpful either. It mostly comes back to "We didn't design these for the enterprise". I just wish they'd figure out that enterprises (Schools in my case) really want this solution to work!

Also, their new method for AdHoc discovery (bluetooth and local WiFi) has actually made things worse so far as I can tell.

[calumhunter]

I used avahi on a linux machine connected to multiple vlans to route the airplay mdns traffic.
worked ok. but ran into the same issues that everyone seems to hit with bogus names showing up like
Apple TV (1)
Apple TV(49)

ect ect ect

Also generated A LOT of traffic using vnstat on the linux machine showed about 10Gb of traffic in 3 months. Thats with about 1000 ipads, 1000 os x machines and around 80 apple tv's on I think about 3 or 4 vlans. We were also sharing out a bunch of Windows print queues via AirPrint with Presto, so lots of Bonjour traffic.

Putting the apple tv's on their own vlan and using bluetooth in testing seemed to be much better, never got to finish the implementation of that though so can't speak to how well it works in production, but it "should" be a lot better and id be looking to go that way and forget about bonjour gateways

[Simmo]

We're in the proccess of putting all Apple TVs on their own vlans that are unroutable from the rest of the network to test out solely using bluetooth discovery.

[calumhunter]

you will probably want to still be routable ie connect over tcp/ip from clients on one vlan to the apple tv's on the other vlan. What you want to stop is the broadcast/multicast data between the vlans

[corbinmharris]

Anyone using Avahi? http://www.avahi.org/wiki/Avah4users

Thanks!

Corbin