We've had a couple students show up with Google Stadia controllers and Chromecasts wanting to play (stream) games. Needless to say, it wasn't working.
We use a NAC and we have game consoles segregated onto their own vlan that does not use NAT, so we don't get NAT related complaints related to traditional consoles. We also have a separate vlan for Chromecasts and Apple TVs so we can use Airgroup to allow casting. We started out setting these up following our normal method - the Stadia controller on the game console vlan and the Chromecast on the casting vlan. It doesn't work. The only feedback we get from the Stadia controller is an orange blinking light, which means it's not able to connect. Some googling leads us to a document that says the controller and the chromecast need to be on the same network. Ok, so what does "same network" mean? Is it the same SSID, the same vlan, the same public IP address? They were already on the same SSID, so we know that's not it. We looked at firewall logs since they were on different vlans (with a firewall in between) and there was no traffic attempts between the two devices. Next, we moved them both to the game console vlan with public IP addresses directly on both devices with no luck. We also moved both to the casting vlan and made sure Airgroup was set up accordingly with no luck. So it doesn't look like same vlan helps, and public IPs directly on devices and casting rules don't make a difference. Finally, we did what I was really hoping would not fix it. We set up a rule so that both devices NAT out to the same public IP address. And poof, it starts working. Our campus is large enough that we have big pools dedicated to NAT so for the most part everyone gets a dynamic 1:1 and only start sharing after the pool is full. There appear to be 3 options here; 1.) create a new vlan just for Stadia and put all chromecasts and controllers there with a NAT rule to funnel them all out the same single public IP, 2.) create individual NAT rules for each person who wants to use Stadia, 3.) don't support Stadia until Google makes it better. For now, we are just going to have to tell students that Stadia isn't going to function here, which is something I don't really like to do. Has anyone else encountered these or have any other knowledge that would help? Documenation on this is scarce and only through tinkering did we stumble upon the fix. This appears to be yet another device that is designed to only work at home and not on enterprise networks. Christopher Howard Senior Network Engineer University of Tennessee at Chattanooga [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> ********** Replies to EDUCAUSE Community Group emails are sent to the entire community list. If you want to reply only to the person who sent the message, copy and paste their email address and forward the email reply. Additional participation and subscription information can be found at https://www.educause.edu/community
