Wireless Access

In my lab environment I enabled Airgroup and it broke printing when the device and the printer were in the same vlan.  The issue was fixed by disabling Airgroup.  I already had broadcast filtering disabled.

I found a post, which I can't find now, that stated Airgroup is only used in a Layer 3 environment.  It acts as a Bonjour gateway / mDNS proxy.  The post stated that when in a Layer 2 environment Airgroup breaks Bonjour/mDNS.  That's pretty much what I saw.

This seems like Airgroup is a little broken.  My lab has clients that print within the same vlan as well as the printer and clients in a separate vlan that also need to print.  I also have seen some of my clients setup the same way.  Not ideal and definitely not a best practice setup, I agree, but it's something that I come across and don't always have the ability to fix.

It seems the best course is to disable Airgroup then perform Bonjour Gateway/mDNS proxy at whatever device is performing routing functions.  In my lab, it would be a Palo Alto firewall or a Fortinet firewall.

Is what I read correct and is this the only way around the issue?

Please check the AirGroup Deployment Guide for more info.

AirGroup includes a Bonjour/mDNS/DLNA proxy and can provide filtering on it. The reason to put this inside your Aruba would be that you can still block/contain the multicast traffic which may kill your WiFi preformance. AirGroup will perfectly work for L2 or L3 (routed) clients, as long as your AP/controller has visibility in each of the VLANs that are used for your mDNS/DLNA servers.

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Herman Robers
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If you have urgent issues, always contact your Aruba partner, distributor, or Aruba TAC Support. Check https://www.arubanetworks.com/support-services/contact-support/ for how to contact Aruba TAC. Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Aruba Networks.

In case your problem is solved, please invest the time to post a follow-up with the information on how you solved it. Others can benefit from that.
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Original Message:
Sent: Dec 05, 2022 03:07 PM
From: Matthew Ausmus
Subject: Airgroup Usage Clarification & Questions

In my lab environment I enabled Airgroup and it broke printing when the device and the printer were in the same vlan.  The issue was fixed by disabling Airgroup.  I already had broadcast filtering disabled.

I found a post, which I can't find now, that stated Airgroup is only used in a Layer 3 environment.  It acts as a Bonjour gateway / mDNS proxy.  The post stated that when in a Layer 2 environment Airgroup breaks Bonjour/mDNS.  That's pretty much what I saw.

This seems like Airgroup is a little broken.  My lab has clients that print within the same vlan as well as the printer and clients in a separate vlan that also need to print.  I also have seen some of my clients setup the same way.  Not ideal and definitely not a best practice setup, I agree, but it's something that I come across and don't always have the ability to fix.

It seems the best course is to disable Airgroup then perform Bonjour Gateway/mDNS proxy at whatever device is performing routing functions.  In my lab, it would be a Palo Alto firewall or a Fortinet firewall.

Is what I read correct and is this the only way around the issue?