MAC addresses not visible behing wireless bridge.

[sanzer]

I have a XBox 360, Sony S-1100 Bluray player and a WDTV Live Plus all of which only offer wired Ethernet that I wanted to connect to my wired gigabit Ethernet network. But my network wiring doesn't run to the room that the XBox 360, etc are in. So I bought a Engenius ERB300H wireless N bridge in order to connect them to the network. I'm using a DLink DIR-655 router setup as an access point connected to my wired gigabit Ethernet network. I'm running the Mezzmo DLNA media server on one of the PC attached to the wired network. In order to function properly Mezzmo needs to see the MAC address of the DLNA clients. It can see all the MAC addresses of everything attached to the wired network. But it can't see the MAC addresses of anything connected to the wireless bridge.

Instead it can only see the MAC address of the EnGenius ERB300h bridge itself. I sent email to Engenius and they stated the following: "The ERB300H bypasses its own Mac Address and shows the Mac Addresses of the connected devices. It is enable by default and there is no way to disable it." So that seems to rule out problems with the brisge. I've also tried a DIR-601 flashed with DD-WRT setup as an access point and still can't see the MAC addresses of devices connected to the bridge. Anyone know what's wrong?

[ftanner]

I have a XBox 360, Sony S-1100 Bluray player and a WDTV Live Plus all of which only offer wired Ethernet that I wanted to connect to my wired gigabit Ethernet network. But my network wiring doesn't run to the room that the XBox 360, etc are in. So I bought a Engenius ERB300H wireless N bridge in order to connect them to the network. I'm using a DLink DIR-655 router setup as an access point connected to my wired gigabit Ethernet network. I'm running the Mezzmo DLNA media server on one of the PC attached to the wired network. In order to function properly Mezzmo needs to see the MAC address of the DLNA clients. It can see all the MAC addresses of everything attached to the wired network. But it can't see the MAC addresses of anything connected to the wireless bridge.

Instead it can only see the MAC address of the EnGenius ERB300h bridge itself. I sent email to Engenius and they stated the following: "The ERB300H bypasses its own Mac Address and shows the Mac Addresses of the connected devices. It is enable by default and there is no way to disable it." So that seems to rule out problems with the brisge. I've also tried a DIR-601 flashed with DD-WRT setup as an access point and still can't see the MAC addresses of devices connected to the bridge. Anyone know what's wrong?

I use an Engenius wireless access point, the EAP600 and can see the MAC addresses of my wireless devices fine. To be honest, I think it's the bridge itself, despite what they (Engenius) says. I have also owned the EAP300 and it showed the MAC addresses just fin in Mezzmo as well. I do not have my access points set up in bridging mode, which could also be a factor, but I don't believe so.

Do you see the correct MAC addresses in the management interface of the bridge? If so, that would lead me to believe that the bridge is masking them. Engenius is correct in that bridges are supposed to be "transparent" and not seen or do any translation, but it looks like this particular bridge is also a switch in addition to being a bridge, so it is "smarter" that "just a bridge".

I don't know if this information helps you at all, but I hope that it does.

[jbinkley60]

I agree that this is a bridge issue. I personally highly recommend the Netgear WNCE4004 for this type of stuff. It's optimized for HD streaming (jitter reducing algorithms and larger buffers for high bandwidth). I have 2 of them running and can stream multiple Blu-Rays at the same time. I've had a Blu-Ray streaming (at close to 40mb/s) and had a 100mb/s file transfer running on another port with no issues. dropouts or any noticeable impact on the Blu-Ray stream. It also presents the device MAC address.

If you don't want to go that route you can also switch Mezzmo to use IP addresses. You just need to have them all be static and not use DHCP for Mezzmo clients.

[Paul]

Check the settings for your bridge. Many bridges have a setting called something like "MAC forwarding" or "MAC bypass" that controls whether MAC addresses are passed through the bridge. Try changing this setting so that your bridge lets devices' MAC addresses to be passed through your bridge.

If that does not help, then you will need to turn on the "Use only IP addresses to identify devices" checkbox in the Media Devices dialog in Mezzmo and assign static IP addresses to your devices so you can get reliable device detection. When this setting is turned on, Mezzmo does not use MAC addresses any more and uses IP addresses instead for device identification.