WLC 2504- mDNS support

[Mikolaj Moryto]

Hello everyone,

I have been trying to find an answer but no success so please forgive me if that has been covered in other thread. 

I currently have vWLC (8.5.105.0) + 2702I setup at home/lab and have been using that with no major issues. The setup consists of couple of SSID to keep different devices separated. The only feature I am missing is mDNS snooping and as I have some Apple devices it does not make it possible to use them across SSIDs/VLANs. My AP is in FlexConnect Local mode and when I try to enable mDNS on particular WLAN it simply says “mDNS is not supported in FlexConnect Local mode”.

I thought I would give it a go and replace vWLC with 2504. However, I am not sure if mDNS gateway is supported on this one either. 

Deployment Guide for 2504 says:

”Bonjour gateway/multicast Domain Name System (mDNS) is not supported anymore on this controller in version 8.0.132 and further 8.0 maintenance release and 8.1.x and later”. 

I found a thread here saying it was not working on 8.1 after upgrading from 8.0 and have been wondering was it not working temporarily and is restored in 8.3/8.5 or it won’t be supported any longer on 2504?

Any help is welcome. 

Thank you,

Mikolaj

[Mikolaj Moryto]

Hi again,

This is something I am going to check later today but the solution maybe to disable local switching and use central switching instead. To be honest it wouldn’t make sense from the technical point of view to expect vWLC to snoop mDNS packets which it doesn’t see when they are being locally switched. 

Thank you,

Mikolaj

[Mikolaj Moryto]

Hi,

Little update. 

I’ve managed to disable local switching on WLAN level so one of SSIDs I’m trying to get working is set as FlexConnect Central Switching now. 

Looking at release notes for vWLC I am aware it says Central Switching is not supported in vWLC. However, I have been wondering if in this case it means it doesn’t work at all or you can get it working but Cisco doesn’t support that kind of deployment due to performance issues risk. 

The issue is I can connect to that Central Switching WLAN and what is interesting is after enabling mDNS on it, I can see services asvertised by a printer on that WLAN in mDNS browser. I can’t ping default router from the client connected to this SSID tough. 

What I also did was packet capture on the vmnic uplink which the ESXi server I run vWLC on is connected to. I can see ARP packets coming from router/switch side to WLC asking for SSID client MAC and I can also see ARP packets from client asking for gateway MAC. It may be misleading as the capture was taken from uplink side so I’m also planning to retake this on the WLC vNIC level. 

Does anyone have any idea whether it’s possible to get ot working and if I’m doing everything the correct way. 

I also tried to change switchport the AP is connected to between access/trunk modes but no success. 

I guess network setup is correct cause everything works as expected in FlexConnect mode. 

Thanks,

Mikolaj

[Mikolaj Moryto]

Hi,

Final update as I got it working. FlexConnect Central Switching + mDNS on vWLC. 

For futher reference, I don’t know if I have missed that or it was there by default, but interfaces I created on WLC for WLANs have been mapped to port number “0”. When I looked at the management interface it was mapped to port “1” which I thought must have been the port  ID for the trunk interface to vSwitch. I remapped interfaces to port “1” and it is working now. 

Regards,

Mikolaj