Up until recently I’ve been connecting to my home from remote locations (such as this) using VPN, and then streamed games from my Xbox to my Surface.
But that doesn’t work anymore. I can reach all other services in my home over the VPN connection, but the “Xbox Console Companion” can’t find the Xbox anymore.
Am I missing something? What can I do?
EDIT 14. nov. 2019: “Masquerade” does the trick.
I’ve noticed that if the PC and Xbox are not on the same subnet, the broadcast traffic that enables the console companion to communicate with your Xbox will not reach it.
For example, if the home network you have a VPN connection to, is a 192.168.1.0/24 subnet and the PC you are running the Xbox Console Companion on is on another subnet (say 192.168.2.0/24 or any other ip range) you will run into trouble.
I am not sure how your VPN is set up but I am guessing if it works sometimes and not others that is likely the case.
I am unsure what the exact overall solution is without some firewall rule magic. I haven’t had the time to sit down and solve it myself.
I set up my vpn to allow streaming yesterday, and have plenty of bandwidth - I can see the console, and click stream, but then it errors out saying it lost the connection to the console. It also fails all the tests. Not sure what else they are looking for, but it does not appear to just be the same subnet… they may be looking for something else to establish the connection now…
I cant’ even stream across VLANS/subnets in-house, much less across a VPN. Still searching for a solution. It isn’t firewall related, becuase the PC I’m trying to use can ping the XBOX, it is something Microsoft changed in an XBox update (from what I’ve read) that simply won’t allow it to work. Shame on Microsoft.
Ah, that might be it. Hmm… I’m not sure how I would solve that on my Mikrotik router.
Ouch, that’s too bad. 
But what did you do to see the console over the VPN connection?
I just found this post. Could possibly be related.
I used a TAP VPN connection. My router has a built in openvpn server.
Back in the day we had a nice app called xlink Kai. It allowed us to use the app to play system link games. Things were discovered about how games were changing to foil the intent of the app…
I think in the end, some games were looking for excessive ping times to discourage users from using this versus Xbox live. I have to wonder if there are other checks in place with the latest updates to prevent using a vpn…
Yes, it looks like it might. That means messing about in the router won’t help as long as the VPN connections are on a different subnet.
This is really bad. Why is it designed like this?
(I suspect we know the answer, but still…)
You could setup a static route in your firewall in order for the devices to talk across separate VLANs. (I’m assuming if you have a home VPN, you have sometype of firewall like a Sonicwall or FortiGate)
Also curious, why the VPN is setup to be on a separate subnet? Wouldn’t it be easier to assign the DHCP scope to say
192.168.0.1-245 and leave the last 9 addresses (192.168.0.246-254) reserved just for VPN devices?
That’s exactly what I’ve testet now, but apparently my network skills are somewhat limited. Now I can no longer access anything on my network… To set it up in the first place I followed this small guide.
I’m sure it’s something I need to do, but what?