Trying Starlink at home. I know, I know, but not only are speeds better than our cable internet the loaded latency is better by a factor of ten so it is worth a try. Couple problems. Note “power brick” plugs into the wall for power and has one port for the dish and another for the router. All connections are wired.

1. Starlink does not use port forwarding. Dish->power brick->Home Router->FMB works but port forwarding set on the Home Router is ignored. Is this really a big deal? (Future Starlink plans are for Ipv6 when “port forwarding won’t be needed”).

2. When using Dish->power brick->FMB and Dish->power brick->Starlink router->FMB the Stage is blank. Without the home router soundjack0.local the networking.dns entry is blank with a red x and link to the docs where it states DNS Rebinding Protection may be preventing Soundjack from working. What does it usually look like if DNS Rebind is ON? (my modems do not have this feature to test).

What do we see in soundjack0.local when “DNS Rebinding Protection” is ON in the modem? Is the “networking.dns” entry blank?

This is discussed in https://symonics.com/fastmusic-helping/ under “DNS Name of the FMB”.

Starlink responded to my query but did not answer whether or not they enforce DNS Rebinding Protection. Could there be another reason the networking.dns setting remains unset?

I’m not the right person to ask (I don’t have a FMB and don’t use Starlink), but maybe I can help a bit.

First I cannot help you by giving exact instructions to solve your problem and Symonics cannot either.
Unfortunately I’m pretty sure that even if that problem could be solved you would be unhappy with the results.

StarLink is a satellite-based internet provider. That means that the signal needs to go from the ground of earth up to the satellite and back to earth. This is a really long way and introduces a rather large delay for the data transmitted. Too much for SoundJack I assume. Satellite based telephone calls have a noticeable delay and that is mainly caused by the large distance. Also TV programs transmitted via satellite are delayed against the same program when it got transmitted by cable or local radio. I think about one second delay maybe something between half a second or two seconds, but a lot too much delay for musical collaboration. (Even in video conferences might recognize a noticable extra delay when you talk to others.)

So that’s the bad news. You can check that by pinging your provider or any other pingable host close to your location. If all get larger than 40 ms, then forget Starlink for SoundJack. It saves you a lot of work that will disappoint you afterwards.
The transmission rate might be high, but also highly delayed and this is exactly what you don’t want for SoundJack. A lower transmission rate (in both directions at least 1 MBit, more is probably needed for more than one peer) is not too bad if the ping times to the provider and your peers is low.

But back to your problem:
A DNS-server should be able to answer IP-address or DNS-name for the FMB. This is usually done in the router. As you see in the two examples in the Symonics help, that can be very differently named and handled in different routers. You do not need to use the DNS-server of the router, you can use a seperate DNS-server on your internal network (maybe that one needs to be reachable from the outside, I’m not sure about that). The DNS-server needs to know the DNS-name and IP-address of the FMB to resolve requests. But setting up a DNS-server is not trivial (I have done it on NextStep/Unix and MacOS X server which is a bit easier).
So better check the ping and if it is too slow, forget to use SoundJack with a Starlink connection.

It would be nice if you would post your ping values here, so that others can directly see if StarLink is an option or not.

I received a reply today from Starlink which confirms DNS Rebinding Protection is in place and not able to be disabled. No surprise they would go for the higher security choice.
When I use the FMB wired to my own modem the latency on the stage to the Virginia mirror is 40-50 with Starlink. Ping to “DNS” and “provider” (named by Starlink) is low 20’s. Latency to “Google” and gaming hosts is as low as 40 but sometimes in the 50’s and I have seen 60’s.
The reason we are exploring this is because the Virginia mirror stage latency is 50-60 with cable internet. The group are physically far apart and stretching the limits of SJ already.
So far limited practical tests are no worse but it does seem we were able to use lower jitter buffer settings but we have not tested that rigorously.

OK, either they use a different technology than what I know about or you have a surface radio link (pointing to a radio link on the surface of earth and not a satellite in the orbit).
Alex explained in his dissertaion which is downloadable from the SoundJack site, what range of distance (in Europe) gives acceptable latency values.

I have no idea why the DNS Rebinding is needed at all. As long as the FMB can find out the WAN-side IP-address they should be able communicate with IP-numbers only. Names are for humans. But that’s a question for Symonics. Maybe they change that in the future if possible.

Yes, cable internet can have a large jitter on latency because several customer share a medium and another customer’s traffic can delay delay your data traffic by different amounts. And the largest time delay comes from either very large distances or the number of hops the traffic is routed through. I wouldn’t recommend using SoundJack if a member is outside a circle of about 200 km diameter.

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