As an update, it looks like I solved my problem and things have been working reliably for a couple of days now. I waited until things were working long enough, because in the past I had periods of working followed by refusal to work.
After trying all the mDNS reflectors/repeaters in the OpenWRt opkg repository, it looks as if there is some sort of obscure problem with Avahi 0.8-8 and the WiiM app. Everything else works with Avahi, including all apps using the WiiM Pro, just not the WiiM app. Weirdly, WiiM support blamed UPnP for my problems, but I explicitly disallow UPnP in my network environment, yet everything works now. I wish they spent a bit more time looking at the logs instead of blowing it off.
The only thing that works is the mdns-repeater app (
https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/mdns-repeater), it's 4 years old and not updated anymore, but it works by simply adding the below to the mdns_repeater configuration file.
With that, everything else works like before, but now the WiiM app also works. I don't have the time/skills to check how various packets are impacted by Avahi vs the mdns-repeater, so why Avahi doesn't work in my specific case but seems to work for others is going to stay a mystery. Also, Avahi seems to work for a variable amount of time if I restart the service, but that's not a long term option (it caused a lot of false hopes, though
. Every time I changed a setting, it worked for a while.
If anyone else sees this in the future with a discovery problem even with the Avahi redirector installed, try mdns-repeater instead. It's more lightweight than Avahi, as an added bonus for router with fewer resources than mine
Thanks to the various folks (esp
@simbun) for all the suggestions.
Code:
config mdns_repeater 'main'
list interface 'br-lan.1'
list interface 'br-lan.101'
list interface 'br-lan.102'