No peers reachable on local lan

[andrekrit]

I've been at this for hours but to no avail. I installed NomadNet on two linux machines (Debian) and two Android phones, but not one single device can see another. They all show 0 reachable peers and no announcements are received on any device. I was so excited to try this out, but am now totally frustrated. This is supposed to work out of the box, right?

I've checked that ip6 multi casting etc is working and also checked that the different devices can ping each other's ip6 address. As suggested in another question, I also started up rnsd using the -vvvv option and the interfaces are bound correctly, but no announcements are received.

Just to ensure that discovery is working in general, I enabled Connect via TCP to sideband.connect.reticulum.network and then I did receive announcements.

What am I missing?

[worst-git-server]

It might be that your router doesn't support multicast ipv6, which apparently is the case for some cheap routers.
could you publish the logs(there might be some warnings or something)?

[jackcox15]

Any logs or errors reported? I have not used Sideband yet so I am unfamiliar there. I've been using Liam Cottle's Reticulum Meshchat + RNS with no issues and find that all of my peers can route + broadcast accordingly.

Upload some logs if possible!

[andrekrit]

I find this issue rather puzzling, since mDNS is used without problem on my wired and wireless devices. I make extensive use of Matter over Thread and I had to get that sorted for these devices to work. Does reticulum also use mDNS for discovery?

I've done some further investigation today (after having a good night's rest ;-) and have made some progress. As a start, I connected both Android phones to the same hotspot, which allowed them to discover each other immediately. I then checked the settings of the AP which they are connected to and found that disabling Multicast-to-Unicast Conversion resolved the problem on the wlan. Funny enough, according to the documentation, that setting only affects ip4. There is a separate setting for IPv6 called IPv6-Multicast-to-Unicast Conversion which was already disabled.

So, at this point, devices that are on the same wlan are able to discover each other, but devices connected via Ethernet still don't. I've disabled IGMP snooping on all (TP-link) switches, but that didn't make any difference. The AP and PC's I'm testing on are connected to the same switch. There is one other upstream switch between this switch and the router which I have not checked as I still need to install the UniFi Network Server in order to gain access.

There are no error messages displayed in the logs and the fact that discovery does work on the wlan, strongly suggests that one of the switches is disrupting the IPv6 multicast mechanism used by Reticulum. Despite this, my Matter over Thread devices work properly and Wireshark shows a lot of mDNS traffic on the network.

Any further help / suggestions would be appreciated. I'll check out the UniFi switch settings tomorrow and see if there's anything that could potentially make a difference.