media device by IP?

[syndy]

Hi,

Strange question i know.

I believe that mezzmo identifies a media device by its MAC address and assigns the profile to this MAC address, is this correct? Is there anyway to tie the profile to the IP address instead? That is, have the same profile for a particular IP even if the MAC address should change?

cheers,

Syndy.

[Britinva]

I'm not sure this is 100% true as I was having issues wherby because I was using DHCP for all my BD players sometimes IPs would change, when this happened other settings for that player would change (i.e. profile and whether to transcode). I ended up changing to static IPs.

Intrigued to know why you would want a profile aligned to a IP - are you using same IP accross different devices or are you getting issue whereby LAN connection and WiFi on same device are giving you different MAC's?

[Paul]

Actually the device profile is assigned to an IP address, not the MAC. We're looking into making this connection between a device and its profile more reliable by switching to using MAC addresses (because these do not change), while the IP address can change at any time.

[FrankVincent]

Hi.
I came across the same problem where the IP adress for a Device did change from time to time.
The DHCP server is a simple Netgear router which have no option to increase the lease time.
Instead of using static IP on the client I use the routers DHCP option to reserve an IP adress for a certain MAC adress.

[syndy]

Hi all,

Thanks for the input and comments.

Dennis, i am a little surprised that the Media device is identified by IP, this does not seem to be what I'm seeing?

I'll try to keep this brief. i had a wireless router, has the Internet and mezzmo on its network. I have a TV and blueray that support dlna. I brought a wireless access point (a buffalo) to make a wireless bridge betwen the tv/blueray and the origional router with the Mezzmo. However, turns out that the Buffalo will only make a WDS bridge with another Buffalo, as my original wireless access point is a different vendor i have to configure the Buffalo to be an Ethernet Convertor. This works OK in terms of the tv and Blueray being able to access the Internet, but the EC mode of the Buffalo results in all traffic coming through the device to be given the buffalo' wireless MAC address. So, the Mezzmo sees the TV as 192.168.7.40 with a MAC of aa:bb:cc:xx:yy:zz and the blueray as ip 192.168.7.42 but with the same MAC as the tv, that is aa:bb:cc:xx:yy:zz (which is the real MAC address of the Buffalo wireless access point).

What is happening is that the Mezzmo will only take on one profile for both the 2 devices, when i use the tv it sets the ip as a .40 address with the aa:bb:cc:xx:yy:zz MAC, when i switch on the blueray, it overwrites the profile with a .42 address (with the same aa:bb:cc:xx:yy:zz MAC). This results in the wrong profile being assigned and i then i have to manually go in and adjust the profile to get things working. From what i can see, it is tieing the profile into the MAC address that it sees as the same for both the tv and blueray. Does this make sense?

Any ideas how i might be able to force the Mezzmo to address two different IP's with different profiles that share the same MAC address? I know this is odd and not a standard setup, but it would be great to be able to have both devices using the Mezzmo (and save me having to go out and buy yet another wireless access point!).

Many thanks,

Syndy.

[Paul]

The confusion comes from the fact that internally Mezzmo looks up whether a device already exists or not using its MAC address, but then assigns a device profile to an IP address. We're going to fix this to make it consistent. In theory, a MAC address should be unique, so no two devices should ever have the same. However, with a bridge like that, it sort of breaks that concept. We'll need to investigate this and come up with a good solution. Since IP addresses can change at any time, going via IP only is not reliable (unless you're using static IPs of course), but now MAC addresses are not reliable either it turns out.

We'll work something out.

Can you please tell me the model of your router, so that maybe we could get one in and set up a similar bridge to yours to see what it looks like and what we can do with it.

[syndy]

Hi Dennis,

Many thanks for the reply. This certainly seems to be what is happening. The tech support guys at Buffalo say this is the norm as there is no WDS standard as such and different vendors apply WDS slightly differently. So, to get two different access points to bridge you need to have one as an Ethernet Convertor. I know, all news to me as well!

The device in question is a WHR-G300n V2. The 1.8 code does not have the EC option, but the latest 1.82 code does. Its under the WDS tab, and is one of the slave option.

I really appreciate you looking into this. As you say, this is not 'normal' for most networks, guess its something strange with wireless.

Not only is Mezzmo a great product but it comes with great support as well.

Cheers,

Syndy.

[Paul]

Thanks for the model - I'll make a note to grab a hold of one if we come across it somewhere.