SSDP DLNA device discovery and bypassing OpenVPN

[siddhartha 11]

I built a little torrent box running Debian that downloads torrents and also runs emby to stream them. I have an OpenVPN client connection to my VPN provider so my downloads are all over the VPN. I noticed that while the VPN tunnel was active, I couldn't see any of my local TV devices while using emby. I suspected this was because all SSDP traffic originating from my torrent box was being broadcast over the VPN and not the local network. Since emby doesn't have any settings to specify a network interface (e.g. eth0 instead of tun0), I had to create a route.

 

After doing a ton of digging, I couldn't find any solid answers online. I did a bunch of reading and finally figured out that that this simple command fixes all my problems:

 

ip route add 239.255.255.250 dev eth0

 

This simply takes all traffic destined to the SSDP standard IP address and routes it to interface eth0 (instead of the VPN interface tun0). So, in whatever script that runs when your tun0 OpenVPN interface comes up, add this command. In the corresponding down script, run:

 

ip route del 239.255.255.250 dev eth0

 

Sorry if this is incredibly obtuse and not necessarily for emby, but since I couldn't find the answer myself, I thought I'd at least post it for anyone else looking. Cheers.

[Luke 42077]

Thanks for the info !

[Happy2Play 9780]

Did you by chance see this topic?

[siddhartha 11]

I have indeed had the problem of allowing remote connections to the server while maintaining the integrity of my VPN and I've posted a solution. Unfortunately, my solution is for Linux only, but the concept is cross platform.