Sony Bravia Smart TV on pfSense SG1100

[zacaustin]

Hi Everyone,

I'm experiencing some issues with a Sony Bravia Smart TV running Android TV on our pfSense network.

I'm running an SG1100 with the most recent version of pfSense as of writing this post (21.02-RELEASE-p1).

It's currently trying to connect over WiFi through our UniFi access points, but the same thing happens if I go directly into a switch.

It connects to the network, is happy for a brief second and then disconnects straight away. It waits a few seconds then tries again. This loops forever.

I've looked at the packet capture and it appears the device actually gets online and starts making some DNS requests and other heartbeat requests back to Sony and what not, before it fails.

We have tried hard resetting the TV, factory resetting, the TV is up to date. It connects to mobile phone hotspots fine and works as expected. Other devices are connecting to the pfSense network and working flawlessly with no issues.

After doing some research and looking at other forum threads, primarily this one (linked below), it seems that there is some known issues with Android TV's and pfSense working together. It seems it's related to unbound DNS.
PFSense not playing nicely with Android TV

However, I've tried everything suggested in these forum threads. I've even disabled the DNS Resolver completely and the issue still persists.

We've had someone from Sony look at it and they just threw blame at the network after it worked on a hotspot. Interestingly, the TV was working for a long time with no issues, all of a sudden one day this started. I suspect it could have been a TV Software Update as it does have auto update on... Despite this, Sony didn't seem to care and were unwilling to help.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could troubleshoot further, anything else to try?

Any help is very much appreciated.

[bcruze]

@zacaustin

I have a Sony Bravia and a sg3100, it’s on my guest vlan
It works perfectly hardwired.. I have a Ubnt nano mounted directly above it which also works fine..

It works on just the out of box dns resolver for me and also by setting it up with next dns google blocking... where it’s pushed dns servers by pfsense and it blocks google services