ARC not working: 504

I’ve read help pages but they are useless unless you’re an IT person. Can this be fixed easily? If not I need to cancel my Roon sub.

{
“ipv4_connectivity”: {“status”:“NetworkError”,“status_code”:504,“error”:“error: Error: ETIMEDOUT, response code: undefined, body: undefined connected? undefined”},
“external_ip”: {“actual_external_ip”:“185.avw.awx.axy”,“actual_external_ipv6”:“null”,“router_external_ip”:“null”},
“natpmp_autoconfig”: {“status”:“NotFound”},
“upnp_autoconfig”: {“status”:“NotFound”}
}

The natPmP and uPnP ‘not found’ status tells me that either you have not configured the uPnP service on your Router or your router does not support it. This being the case, you have three options to start with:

  1. Enable uPnP on your router. This will then allow your Roon Server to request a port forward for ARC.

  2. Manually confgure a port forward for Roon ARC. Forward TCP connections to the port number (displayed on the ARC status page where the diagnostic text came from) to the ip address of the Roon server (also displayed on the same page). Note: Going this route will work better in the long term if you also configure a DHCP address reservation so that your Roon Server always gets allocated the same ip address. If you don’t do this, there will come a time when the Roon Server ip address changes and then ARC will stop working until your change the port forward rule to match.

  3. Use Tailscale. If you go this route, and get ARC working, the Roon ARC settings page will continue to report ‘Not Ready’ and give the diagnostic text because this page pertains only to port forwarding setups. Once Tailscale is successfully configured, then this status can be ignored.

Roon has a help centre article on Port Forwarding at:

There is a further port forwarding troubleshooting article at:

Finally, there is a help centre article on using Tailscale at:

The page above has links to specific setup instructions for Windows, Mac, Linux and ROCK/Nucleus Roon Servers. Unfortunately, the ROCK/Nucleus instructions do not address the original Nuclues, the Nucleus Plus or ROCK installs that use BIOS Boot as all of these systems are restricted to running RoonOS 1.0 build 259 which does not have tailscale support. If you r.un one of these servers, then it is still possible to use Tailscale but you must run it on a separate computer (eg a Raspberry Pi) and set it up as a subnet router.

Note: If you setup uPnP or port forwarding, it is possible that ARC will still not work - the most frequent causes of this are that:

  1. Your ISP does not support port forwarding due to the use of CG-NAT. In this case, the diagnostic text will likely change to report ‘MultipleNatFound’. There is no solution to this issue other than to ask the ISP to change their configuration for your service to one that supports port forwarding - sometimes at extra cost - sometime not possible.

  2. When using uPnP, the port used for Roon ARC is already being forwarded to another device. In this case the diagnostic text will likely show some thing like “ConflictInMappingEntry” and the easiest solution is to change the port number used by Roon ARC.

1 Like

Hello @richard_ingram,

Thank you for reaching out to Roon Support.

To resolve the issue, we recommend following the guidelines provided by @Wade_Oram. In my opinion, the easiest solution is to use Tailscale, as it only requires installing the application and logging in with the same account.

If you need any additional assistance with port forwarding or UPnP configuration, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Unfortunately I have no idea what any of these mean. Never heard of Tailscale? Im not prepared to mess with my routers settings as nothing else has issues with it. I might end up with no internet. I thought the whole point to Roon/Arc was that no IT skills were required. If ARC doesn’t work out of the box I have no reason to keep my Roon sub.

Hi @richard_ingram,

There’s a lot of jargon involved with port forwarding, so our apologies for the confusion.

Put simply, the message “504” you’ve seen in Roon Settings means that your internet service provider or your router is blocking the connection to ARC. If you don’t want to mess with router settings or contacting your service provider, Tailscale is an alternative.

Tailscale is a free app you install alongside Roon on your computer and phone that allows you to circumvent your service provider’s implementation so that ARC can connect automatically without any configuration.

Here’s a simple guide with instructions for installing Tailscale on your Mac and phone. It takes only an estimated 10-15 minutes to set up and doesn’t require any technical knowledge.

https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/tailscale-setup-instructions-macos-roonserver

Let us know if we can help further. Thanks!