Unticking 'Enable Inter-Station Traffic' while using services such as Apple TVs or Chromecasts

[mcollins]

I'm looking at blocking inter-station traffic, by unticking 'Enable Inter-Station Traffic' but I'm also looking at using Apple TVs and Chromecasts on the WiFi. Just wondering if anyone has come up with a way to still allow access to services like Apple TVs or Chromecasts without the need to cable them in?

[mcollins]

@Jose Gonzalez​ ​ and @Brian Powers​  Regarding the Apple TVs, if you want to connect via WiFi or cable and your clients are on a different VLAN then yes you need some kind of a gateway to route or relay the advertisements across the VLANs. 

The 3rd Generation Apple TVs do support Bluetooth pairing but a lot of environments don't like this. I personally haven't played around to confirm this behaviour but my understanding is that the Apple TVs will create an ad-hoc network between the device on channel 149 with a width of 40MHz for 11n and 80MHz for 11ac. 

Obviously, the rest of your networks infrastructure would need to avoid these channels, which is an issue for high density environments. 

Also, as your Apple TV and client are now in an ad-hoc network, you wouldn't be able to stream content which isn't saved locally to the client, unless you have 3G enabled on the client.

[mcollins]

@Jose Gonzalez​ The listed models are only the entry level APs, I've personally used AP230s on networks with around 1000 MacBooks and over 10 VLANs - it worked fine for me. I have read Aruba switches now support mDNS routing/relaying but I've never tested it myself.

[mcollins]

@Brian Powers​ I would have expected inter-station traffic to just be for each SSID, as it's set per SSID, however, from my testing when one SSID has it applied, all traffic is blocked regardless of SSIDs. I've been testing with AP230s and AP250s on NG.

[jose_gonzalez]

@Brian Powers​ Thanks! I think your answer is best to the original question. 

[AnonymousM · Accepted solution]

That depends a lot on the version of the AppleTVs. The 3rd generation and newer (I think) actually use low power bluetooth for pairing to the iOS device to do the screen share. Meaning they don't even have to be connected to a WLAN to work.

The older ones use the WLAN for all communications.

https://help.apple.com/deployment/ios/#/apd8fc751f59

Bonjour would be needed to traverse VLANs, not SSIDs specifically (unless the SSIDs were attached to different VLANs).