well, i do have some more info on thisā¦ it would appear at first glance that the source route rule i installed is blindly forwarding all packets with the ip address of the Apple TV to the wan port. it remains a mystery why the router is even seeing these packets on its lan port, since the switches between the Apple TV and the router should have learned the mac addresses and not be broadcasting the packets to the segment of the lan that the router is actually on.
but that makes me wonder if this has something to do with all the MDNS traffic involved with the Apple TV and service advertisement, etc. because presumably some of those are IP broadcast packets which i assume must also be ethernet broadcast packets, or at least multicast packetsā¦
its not clear to me why this would hose things up as nothing should be responding to those packets that get routed. it could be that as part of the multicast stuff that maybe the Apple TV or the server thinks that the mac address of the server or appleTV is actually the mac address of the router, thus hosing things. there is a very ārace conditionā feel to whatās happening; the client can spend a long time looking for the server and never find it. sometimes it eventually finds the server and then all is well for a long while.
bottom line though is this is probably a misconfiguration of the router on my partā¦ i really only want the source route rule to take effect post-routing, and not pre-routing.
rob