At home I have an ADSL modem that I use also as router. For the record, it is a DavoLink DV-2020 provided by Tele2 in the Netherlands. It turns out that if a computer is connected with a cable to the router and another computer is connected wirelessly, then they cannot see each other's services that are advertised through Bonjour (Apple's service discovery protocol, an implementation of Zeroconf). The combinations wired/wired and wireless/wireless work fine. This means that somehow wire- and wireless- connected machines are on different physical networks although their IPs are in the same range (192.168.1.*).
The modem in question doesn't provide many options that I could play with. So, I was thinking of buying a second router to connect to the modem, and then connect all my machines to this second router. The problem is that I am afraid that I will have again the same problem.
I am looking for suggestions on routers that offer the functionality I want (Bonjour between wired and wireless connections). I suppose that one solution would be Apple's Airport Extreme Base Station but at 160€ it is ridiculously expensive. Any other options out there? And why is it so difficult to find in the technical characteristics if wired and wireless connections are on the same physical network?
Best Answer
It looks like the router isn't handling multicast (which is what Bonjour uses) correctly. There's a possible fix mentioned here although it might not work with your particular modem.
Anyway, multicast bridging is the feature you want, although it's hard to determine if a router supports it without actually testing it. If you are happy running separate networks for wired and wireless, one option is buying a router with OpenWRT support, then running Avahi as a mDNS reflector between them.