Personally, I’m sick to death of having to reinstall my Roon ROCK and get it working again, and have an update from Roon kill my perfectly working system. 3 times this past month. I’ve had to reinstall my ROCK server after Roon did another of their flakey updates. This is absolutely annoying and kills any joy I get from using this product. I have a lifetime membership, but I’m now very wary of recommending Roon to any of my friends. If I with a PhD in computer science and 35 years of research experience have such a hard time getting Roon to work reliably, imagine my poor non-tech friends.
I recommend every software developer at Roon buy a copy of Site Reliability Engineering by the folks at Google on how to design reliable software. Yes, Google has outages too, one recently, but nowhere near the frequency of Roon.
Ok, back to reinstalling my Rock server yet again (teeth gnashing!).
A famous quotation, falsely attributed to Einstein, says that ‘‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’’.
Why not try something different? If you’re tech-savvy, install a Linux server OS on your hardware and Roon Server on that. If anything, it will give you log files to examine and try to understand what is going wrong with your Roon installation.
Roon by no means is perfect, far from it, but having every update nuke the installation is not the normal outcome, either.
I have problems with Roon. I run my perpetual license off a NAS. Per the spec it is under powered, connects to the media server using wireless, etc. So I know my setup isn’t perfect. To whit, I’m adding a half gig of SSD buffer to the NAS and a 100 megabit wired connection.
All that said, aside from what I believe is the occasional corruption in the library that requires a reboot of the NAS and time for the library to reindex, and the occasional dropout from running on wireless, I don’t have any serious complaints. Getting upgrades is not one of them. Those are ALWAYS delivered seamlessly.
FWIW, I’m a computer software tech that’s learned there are two kind of problems. The ones others have created and the ones I created. Being able to tell the difference between them makes troubleshooting a lot easier.
Not making any accusations. Just sharing my experience.
Happy to help. I don’t have your 35 years experience but I’d be willing to look over the logs to help identify the issue.
I don’t look at the logs much on my own system because the only instability I had was when one of the spinny drives started failing… but this is a good community and your experience is in the minority. I’m sure with details of the issue we can sort it.
Hi @Sridhar_Mahadevan,
As far as I’m aware the last update from Roon was B667 back in October, about 2 months ago, nothing since then. So something seems amiss in relating these recent failures to a Roon update. Thus to get to the root course may I suggest the next time it happens create a topic in the #support section of the forum so Roon’s team can investigate for you.
PS Are you aware that in:
Roon --> Settings -> About --> Core Config
It is possible to configure Roon not to auto-update, this is how I have my system setup.
Not because I don’t want the update, but I like to control when it happens.
PPS @R1200CL, kindly notified me that B710 has just been released, which I’d completed missed … my bad! However, my advice still stands re. posting a support topic to get direct help from Roon’s @support team as the failures you are experiencing is atypically.
@Sridhar_Mahadevan wow, sorry to hear that you are not reaping the benefits of a ROCK acting like an appliance that I have. For what it’s worth, when there is a ROCK update it’s been a 1-click quick & seamless reboot process for me; I’ve been running less than a year so I can’t claim long-standing experience like some others on here.
Are you running one of the “approved” NUCs, or do you have a different hardware config (aka, MOCK or some other names around here)? I will admit that I’m DIY enough to want the experience of getting it going (which was maybe 90 minutes of work, mostly getting USB boot enabled), but didn’t want any ongoing maintenance - I want it to act like a “managed appliance” and thus far it has met my expectations, but if I’d had the experience you’re describing I’d be mighty disappointed. Good luck!
This is odd. I have ROCK on NUC and it updates automagically with no problems ever. You should have this experience, too. Make a support request and share your configuration with the ROON folks. It’s not realistic to expect no updates. Good luck!
No issues here at Dismal Manor. The Roon Server runs in a TrueNAS VM on top of Debian. Roon storage is in the TrueNAS pool as datasets with SMB shares. The design of TrueNAS is such that the SMB shares are ready when the VM starts. Here I migrated from FreeNAS 11 to TrueNAS Core 12 without issue. I also applied the 1.8 server update without issue just telling Roon Controller make it so.
I have not updated Debian.
I had Roon server in a Mac 2009 Mini running MacOS and Debian before moving it to the VM. The issue with that arrangement is that the Mac would boot before the shares were ready causing the service opening to fail to mount the media. Check this hypothesis for your ROCK. If possible directly connect the media library and see if this changes the symptoms.
Keep in mind that ROCK is a regular Roon server plus a curated Linux distribution. No magic here. The intent was to make unattended Linux updates possible for those not wanting to be system admins.
It seems unlikely that Roon is having difficulty building custom distributions. After 25 years, there are well established procedures and tools to pull sources, merge local patches, configure, and build release packages. Machine update procedures are simple, well understood, and automated.
Based on my experience here before Roon Server in a VM, I’d suggest that you take a hard look at SMB if you are using it. SMB mounting at launch can be tender.
Also review the procedures used to add music to your music library. I ran into file access permissions using a Mac to rip music into the library. I had to be careful with read-traverse permissions in the music library tree. This was fiddly but once right is solid.
All customization should happen via the controller Settings UI. Don’t count on any changes made outside the controller to be preserved.
I don’t normally make comments and I may be missing something but not sure if this is a ROON issue. I’ve been using ROON for 5 years and have never once had to make any adjustments or reload anything or look into anything the entire time. It just works. I do get the the random ‘can’t play music from Tidal’ something or the other that requires a DAC power cycle to fix. But that has nothing to do with what you are seeing.
