Cannot resolve Bonjour local hostname when on wifi extender

Question

I have a somewhat twisted network setup, mainly because I have to share the wifi signal coming from the next door (long story). Recently, I wanted to add NAS and other things that required Ethernet connection, so I bought a Netgear wifi extender (WN2000RPT) that not only extends the wifi network but also provides four Ethernet ports. I then connected ReadyNAS to it.

It worked fine, except for one quirk. I cannot resolve the local hostname of my NAS, mothership.local, when I am on the extended wifi SSID. It works fine when I am on the original SSID. Once I resolve it once, I think I can go back to the extended network to use the NAS, which works faster (I'm thinking the transfer is handled by the extender and does not travel all the way back to the DSL modem that provides the original network).

It would be much simpler if I can resolve the local hostname while on the extended network. Is this an inherent limitation of the extender I'm using (i.e. it does not broadcast Bonjour calls)? Or is there an workaround?

Answer 1

bonjour works via multicast. Some extenders don't support multicast forwarding. Check if your extender supports multicast or if it can be enabled.

Answer 2

Well instead of relying on a DNS resolution you can hardcode it in /etc/hosts (in Windows, it's C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc or %systemroot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts).

This will speed up things a bit but I don't think you will notice the change. It should however works as a temporary solution for not resolving the hostname.

DNS protocol works on port 53 in UDP - check if this traffic is not blocked and if the extender has a correct DNS address setup. It should be default gateway if I'm not mistaken.