Apple TV and Filtering

[Jwzg]

First, let me say thanks to all of you for being a polite and highly knowledgable group. I appreciate it.

 

Scenario: Our school installed several Apple TV's last year and expanded the number this year. However, we have installed a Lightspeed Rocket filter which basically kills the ability of the Apple TV to do much of anything but mirror via AirPlay. We currently use Xirrus WiFi.

 

Question: Do tools exist to recognize Apple TV's and put them on a separate subnet so we can keep them unfiltered without hardwiring them in and assigning static IP's?

 

Let it be known, I'm a bit of a network newb, but the guy who runs our network can be a human roadblock at times, so ANY help is appreciated.

Edited December 3, 2013 by Jwzg

[free780]

You could have a separate vlan for them. It should depends if they need ipads to be able to airplay to them. Its good practice to have wireless devices on a separate vlan. Do apple tvs work if you create a route between subnets?

[iSteve]

Filtering as in proxy-ing? You can configure a proxy for them using the iPhone configuration utility, apparently.

[dhicks]

Filtering as in proxy-ing?

 

No, Lightspeed's filtering appliences (or the one we have, anyway) operate by sitting in the middle of a network connection and transparently filtering all the traffic that passes through them. They aren't a firewall, you need a separate firewall to work with them - we have our Lightspeed server between the firewall and the rest of the network.

 

If the Apple TV is expecting to use an HTTP / HTTPS based service to get information, the Lightspeed filter could simply be blocking the URL - check the Lightspeed's logs and see if there's a bunch of blocked requests coming from an Apple TV. Lightspeed do also do some protocol-based filtering - there don't seem to be many configuration options in their user interface, but there is an option somewhere to enable / disable filtering of peer-to-per protocols. If the Apple TV traffic looks like peer-to-peer traffic to the Lightspeed device it might be filtering it out - try disabling the option and see what happens.

[Jwzg]

iPads must be able to mirror. The filtering comes into play when trying to reach iTunes as well as YouTube and other services that we may not want filtered for only those devices.

[GTFD8215]

JWZG,

 

Sounds like we have the same exact situation.... So far most of the Apple TV installs I have done have been content with just mirroring their Ipads...

 

Just wondering what solution, if any, you can up with?

[Manny-Tech]

We have around 15 Apple TVs. We ended up just assigning static IPs and then entering that range into the Lightspeed Rocket with a default rule set.

[jdhovinetz]

Agree with Liam86. Create a custom rule set and apply it to a policy assignment scoped out to your Apple TV's IPs. Lightspeed provides all the documentation on their wiki.