Wireless router that supports Bonjour between wire- and wireless- connected machines

Question

At home I have an ADSL modem that I use also as router. For the record, it is a DavoLink DV-2020 provided by Tele2 in the Netherlands. It turns out that if a computer is connected with a cable to the router and another computer is connected wirelessly, then they cannot see each other's services that are advertised through Bonjour (Apple's service discovery protocol, an implementation of Zeroconf). The combinations wired/wired and wireless/wireless work fine. This means that somehow wire- and wireless- connected machines are on different physical networks although their IPs are in the same range (192.168.1.*).

The modem in question doesn't provide many options that I could play with. So, I was thinking of buying a second router to connect to the modem, and then connect all my machines to this second router. The problem is that I am afraid that I will have again the same problem.

I am looking for suggestions on routers that offer the functionality I want (Bonjour between wired and wireless connections). I suppose that one solution would be Apple's Airport Extreme Base Station but at 160€ it is ridiculously expensive. Any other options out there? And why is it so difficult to find in the technical characteristics if wired and wireless connections are on the same physical network?

Solution 1

It looks like the router isn't handling multicast (which is what Bonjour uses) correctly. There's a possible fix mentioned here although it might not work with your particular modem.

Anyway, multicast bridging is the feature you want, although it's hard to determine if a router supports it without actually testing it. If you are happy running separate networks for wired and wireless, one option is buying a router with OpenWRT support, then running Avahi as a mDNS reflector between them.

Solution 2

I can report that my Linksys WRT54G without custom (OpenWRT) firmware supports the bridged multi-cast traffic just fine. Wifi printing to a wired HP printer with Bonjour/Zeroconf works. However in my case, the firmware on the HP 2600n had to be patch to the latest version to get this working correctly, so it might not be your router at fault.

Solution 3

I found a tip on a D-Link forum for my DIR-655 related to Bonjour and mulitcast.

The part that made my bonjour iPhone apps able to connect to my home network was this setting:

on the Advanced tab, Advanced Network settings, there is a check box for Enable Multicast Streams. Tick this and reboot the router.

Comments

[MMB]

What it likely does is isolate traffic coming in over WiFi via the Access Point (AP) from the physical LAN. Since some people run local servers for backups or media sharing and wireless is far less secure than hard-wired, it's a nice option and should be on by default.