TP-Link issues resolved (kind of)

[James Sentman]

Hello Tom,

Having multiple network ports active at the same time can indeed be done properly, but it may be necessary to either to additional setup on the Mac or it may be necessary to make changes in the software to support what interfaces are being used for what connection. Unfortunately the TP-Link libraries do not support this out of the box so I would have to update them myself and I’m not certain that it will solve the problem in this case.

I have added such support for some other plugins, specifically the Home Kit and Alexa ones as they listen for incoming connections and that needs to be bound to a specific interface. In the case of the TP-Link plugin it only makes outgoing connections and so this is not going to help.

The reason the TP-Link app can still talk to the devices is that it is on the same wifi network with them and therefore has no problem routing the messages to and from the app.

Can the Mac talk to other devices on the Wireless network? If you used another computer only connected to WiFi can you ping the Mac? Or otherwise talk to it? The simplest cause I can think of is that the XTension mac sees that a wired network is plugged in and makes that the default since they try to prioritize a wired over a wifi interface by default I think. It may be able to reach the internet but it may not be able to reach other devices on the WiFi if the very complicated router device you described is not setup to bridge the 2 networks. This is what I suspect is the issue. Nothing connected to that ethernet is being bridged with anything on WiFi. If that is the case then you’ll have to figure out how to set that up. There is no good reason to have your wired and wifi devices on a separate “network” from your description it seems that the only reason you did that was because the router doesn’t want to configure itself to have them be bridged? And if so then this is the most likely problem as it’s specifically not bridging traffic from one to the other. I would work to fix that and get everything on the same subnet first.

Secondly it may be possible to tell the Mac that traffic for anything on the WiFi subnet should use the WiFi interface. If the Mac is properly configured with 2 different subnets on the 2 interfaces it should do this automatically. Broadcasts from the one should also get forwarded out to the other so that the TP-Link devices should be able to be found. But that isn’t happening or the replies aren’t finding their way back. Again the simplest issue is that the router isn’t routing between the 2 subnets and the Mac is trying to use the Ethernet for both subnets.

It may be that the wifi and ethernet on the Mac are not getting a proper DHCP address or are using an incorrect subnet or something that is confusing that. Please visit the network control panel and check the IP Address, subnet and router address for both the WiFi and the Ethernet interfaces that you’re using. Do you see a reasonable address for all that in both places? Depending on the configuration of the DHCP server you might not actually have the proper address on the wired side and so it might not be working at all. You could give the 2 interfaces proper static IP’s and see if we can make the Mac route the messages properly that way, but this is still going to cause you problems in the future with other new devices and wired devices not being able to find each other depending on how they are connected. The real solution is getting the wired and wireless networks properly bridged so that you don’t have to do custom routing configuration. This is the solution I would really recommend!





> On May 19, 2020, at 9:00 AM, Tom Yarmas <tom at yarmas.com> wrote:
> 
> I finally figured out what is wrong with my TP-Link in XTension (it suddenly stopped working and I could no longer get it to work).
> 
> It turns out that I added a wired ethernet connection in addition to my existing wireless connection a while back.This wired connection is on a separate subnet and is used for my Unifi network controller.
> 
> If I disable that wired connection, then my TP-Link suddenly works and everything is fine. 
> 
> So, I have deduced that I cannot seem to have the XTension Mac on 2 different subnets and expect this to work?
> 
> Is there a way to define which network device or subnet the TP-Link interface works on? 

Thanks,
 James


James Sentman                       http://www.PlanetaryGear.org		http://MacHomeAutomation.com




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