Virgin 360 TV Box

[Kanoe]

Just wondering if anyone had an experience of using a Virgin 360 TV box with networking set up with a vpn.

We have just set up a VPN from our router so that all devices on the network go through it. Took a bit of fiddling to get everything working, iplayer didnt like it one bit, but thought we it all sweet.

However, when we turn the Virgin TV box on it says service suspended, you are connected to the wrong network.

Fair enough I thought, it doesnt like going through the vpn. Our router has an option so that you can specify certain devices by ip to not use the vpn and just connect as normal but for whatever reason this hasnt solved it.

Googling the issue yielded a post on VM forums where someone says there is a whole thread discussing this here but the link is now dead.

We have the virgin internet hub in modem onmy mode and use a synology 2600ac router and this was never a problem before until we tried to add the vpn.

Am thinking of trying to wireshark the box to see where it is trying to communicate to to see if we can open anything up to there to help as VM dont publish that kind of info.

[Kanoe]

Update: So i think the policy routing settings on the router should have done the job by setting the tv box to go through the WAN rather than VPN but after some testing it seems that the policy routing doesnt work and i cant work out why.

The policy is set up with the correct ip addresses but it seems to ignore it and always go through the vpn regardless.

Probably going to have to turn the VPN off so i can have TV back again but that sucks big time. Anyone got an advice for trying to set up policy routes?

[AGTDenton]

I had a look at the Synology manual. It has a section on IPTV and set top boxes. But the more I read that section it seemed to be unrelated.

If you still have that post with the dead link, you could put it into the web archive and see if the URL was archived.

[Percy1983]

I would go with 2 access points, internet provider hub running normally and connect any device you don't want on vpn to it. and then a second access point with different wifi etc which runs the vpn.

I would use different subnets to avoid any ip conflicts.

[Kanoe]

I think we wanted to avoid that cause doesnt it get a bit funny with 2 devices trying to be the router on the network? Double NAT and all that jazz?

[Percy1983]

Generally with the second access point on a different subnet all should be fine, I will say I helped a friend set one up but not really used it myself but he has been happy with the setup.

[Kanoe]

Well i thought something that might help after finding that numerous people with that router had policy Routing work flawlessly is to update the router to latest software version but the update isnt automatic as its a major SRM change from 1.2 to 1.3 (essentially a whole new OS) and the manual update doesn't work as it says the file from synology to do the update is corrupt.

So wasted today to update the blummin thing with no luck either.

[Kanoe]

Well that was 3 very painful days but did manage to finally get this working last night. For future reference here is a breakdown on what happened / resolution.

TLDR - Update SRM to newest and then policy route the Virgin 360 box to avoid the VPN and the TV services work fine.

Issue 1:
Policy Routing on the Synology RT2600ac on SRM 1.2.5 Update 11 did nothing at all, whichever interface was listed as the top priority all traffic went through it, regardless of any policy routes that were set up. All devices on the network are allocated a fixed IP based on their MAC address so in theory it should have been easy set up, it just didn't work.

This could have been, as far as I can tell, an undocumented bug with SRM 1.2.5 Update 11 or something in the router had become messed up after several years of continual use.

Issue 2:
To try and fix issue 1 I noticed that there was newer versions of software for the router from Synology, SRM 1.3.1. As this was a major SRM revision (basically a new OS for it) you have to do it manually as it is not offered through the SRM update feature of the router (it takes some functionality away, adds some new ones and can't be rolled back). Having downloaded the file from Synology the update issues started.

Loading the file to the router from a PC (desktop / laptop) resulted in 4/5 times it saying that the upload of the file failed. On the rare occasion that it did upload the file the update process would then fail at between 8% and 10% saying that the file was corrupt.

Couldn't figure that out but on the nth time rebooting the router noticed that the VPN was still connected if not being used as was lower down on the priority list so turned it off and was in the process of raising a support ticket with Synology and was trying again so I could screenshot the exact error message and it went and completed. Typical.

A note of warning that doing so completely wiped it back to new state and needed to be completely set up again from scratch but after doing so and setting up policy routes it now worked as it was supposed to and therefore the TV services work again as it now correctly routes the traffic from the box outside of the VPN.

[ik9000]

Glad you got it fixed. Well persevered.

[Saracen]

Glad you got it fixed. Well persevered.

Yup, that. It shouldn't be that much of a PITA though. If my (admittedly quick) read was correct, I'd be a bit miffed with Synology. The VM box seemed to react in a predictable way to an 'alien' IP. Or am I reading it wrong.