Ethernet switch?

I have so much crap in my house now that in actual fact I have 4 switches in use, a 48 porter in the loft (main switch) two 8 porters around the house and a 24 port switch in the shed.

An awesome asus router connects this lot together, and thats connected to a crappy virgin hub which is in modem only.

It all works for the most part perfectly, and my opinion is the quality of the router is what ties everything together, don't skimp and don't settle for ISP supplied ones.

After reading the start of this thread yesterday, I decided to take my Netgear switch out of the chain and link my NAS and 172 directly to my Extreme (this links into a home hub). In terms of system operation the only things I have noticed is that Qutecontrol reacts more quickly than it did, menus load much quicker and moving from one track to another is faster!!! I didn't think sound quality would be impacted, however internet radio seems to have become clearer/more detailed.......or maybe washing my ears helped!

+1

This is very helpful information, and may give me a path to fix an issue from another thread...  I was trying to get Bubble UPnP working on my Synology DS214, and managed eventually to install and get this up and running, however one of the issues is now ensuring port 58051 is "open".. never done this before...

I have a Motorola Modem, which feeds an Airport Extreme, which then passes straight through to an 8 port NetGear switch, feeding ethernet Cat 5 through the house..

Do I configure the port settings in the Airport Utility, or in the Netgear Browser UI? I thought the Airport just took the output of the modem and broadcast a wi-fi signal, allowing the NetGear to do the rest..

Any advice?

Thanks in advance..

I have no ideas if you can open ports on the apple, and its here where the severe limitations of the extreme a exposed.

The switch won;'t have anything to do with it. Anyhow if its up and running don't worry about it.

Most if not all the  Apple Airport products do have port forwarding.. But remember the port forwarding occurs a cross a NAT/PAT router interface, IE on the broadband router between the WAN port and LAN switch ports.. and importantly you usually only need to do this if you want an external machine or person to *initiate* a connection or log in to one of your machines/hosts on your home LAN, or you are using a specialised application that must retain the use of a specific port across the router, and the application will makes these requirements clear.

if you are simply using the Airport device without its WAN router abilities (ie bridge mode) then this is irrelevant.. Don't connect anything to the WAN interface other than a DSL modem or fibre NTE and leave it unconnected if you are not using. Port forwarding is a meaningless concept on internal switch ports and bridges.

Port 58051 is a regular private port that can be used by applications. I would not forward this port across your broadband router unless you know what you are doing for a specialised application.. you could be making a security hole in your firewall.

however if you see this message on an internal PC type firewall, then that is different and you should enable, but only aftre confirming you are happy about what is prompting you to open the port on the local machine. Basically if something you need stops working when you don't open it you have confirmed this.

+1 Simon's reply, sage advice (as ever).

Gentlemen, thanks for the time on this... Just some additional context. One of the recent posts discussed using a combination of Bubble UPnP on a Synology to stream Tidal direrectly to my NDS.. Kazoo is apparently also installed on the client, which in my case would be an apple device. After installing Java rte on the Synology, I installed Bubble UPnP and activated it.. All good, but in the settings, there was an error showing the Server was unreachable.. The install docs show the following:

If "Server is reachable from Internet" is displayed, everything is fine and BubbleUPnP Server is ready to use for remote access.

Otherwise something is preventing the Internet to connect on the HTTP or HTTPS port. This will likely be a NAT or firewall issue. For example, if the public HTTP port is 58050 and the LAN IP Address displayed is 192.168.1.10

• Add a rule on your router to redirect connection on TCP port 58050 to LAN IP Address 192.168.1.10 on port 58050. You must use the same port for the redirection
• Add a rule on your firewall to allow incoming traffic on TCP port 58050 on the 192.168.1.10 machine
• For HTTPS access repeat the 2 steps above with the HTTPS port (58051 by default)

IMPORTANT: if you use HTTPS access, the HTTP port must still be open as it is still used for media streaming requests only. 

So all I need to figure out is how to configure this in the Airport Extreme..  I checked, and my Netgear, and its purely a gigabit switch...  Ill search the web for Advice on the Apple set up/firewalls etc.. 

Thanks again.. happy listening...

Ok, so you want to remotely access your UPnP server from the Internet? if you are sure you want to do this, then fine, if not don't set up that rule... this absolutely isn't necessary for standard Naim streaming capability.

Simon