So I have been trying to set up our Subsonic server so that I can actually listen to podcasts (and – I suspect – with a bit of cunning BBC radio 6 music, which would be amazing) while I’m in the car (via my phone). This, one might imagine, would not be difficult.
Open the relevant port on the router (which I always forget to do) – and lo, it registers the service on subsonic.org and you can connect. Only not.
Because it turns out that the Xfinity Arris router is, shall we say, “well known” as a point of failure in anything which needs port forwarding. There have followed several days of trying to work out what I was doing wrong – I’d opened the port, and when I tested it at home it showed as open – but I couldn’t connect when I left the house. I discovered today that it just randomly re-closes the port. It’ll be fine and open for a while and then will suddenly close. It still says that the port is open. It still reports that the port is open. But it isn’t.
If you tell it to close it and reopen it then it will reopen it, for a bit. For an unidentified random period of time.
So that’s a quality piece of hardware.
Having checked the Xfinity forums, the answer is “buy another router, these don’t work”. Which reminds me muchly of my experience with a BT router. The funny thing is that if you are using the port (so if it’s open when I leave the house and I hit play on Subsonic as I’m leaving) then it works until I pause playback. Then at some point after that it’ll get bored and close the port.
Which leads me to think that perhaps I’ll have to add a router to the list of stuff to buy, which is irritating, because frankly, this is a pretty basic router feature and it really, really ought to work.
