I added a Nucleus One to my Roon account in hopes of having better luck connecting to ARC outside of the home. However, I am not having any success as ARC may or may not connect when I am in my car. However, in the rare occasion it does connect, it times out. Even with a solid 5G+ connection. I have learned more about port forwarding than I ever cared to know trying to solve this. Today I started down the Tailscale path and was immediately stymied by my inability to locate "Nucleus Web Administration Interface." I am not a tech person, but absolutely love Roon and would really like to have music that is not located on Tidal and in my personal library available.
Describe your network setup
Roon Nucleus One, Roon resides on a Dell Ultrabook (more or less permanently docked) running Windows 10 Pro v22H2 with 16GB of ram. Both are connected via ethernet cable from a BGW320-505 modem/router provided by AT&T and on fiber.
You can access the Nucleus Web Administration Interface from within Roon. Navigate to Settings → Setup → Find RoonOS and then click on the hyperlinked IP address that you see next to your Nucleus One.
If you have not created a Tailscale account (they’re free), then you’ll need to create one first and install the Tailscale app to your phone.
From there, you’ll simply open the Nucleus One administration interface via the steps above and click “Log In” next to the Tailscale tab.
Once you’ve set up Tailscale, please let us know if the new network pathway between RoonServer and ARC provides for a more stable connection. Keep the RoonServer laptop hardwired via ethernet to the main router during testing to rule out WiFi interference.
Connor, thank you for your quick reply. I had no problem connecting to Tailscale on the Nucleus thanks to your instructions. I also have Tailscale connected and running on my iPhone. I am attempting to use ARC via Apple CarPlay. I did a test drive and consistently had a 5G+ signal running 3-5 bars. It saw ARC, but never connected to music gave me the message "Poor Connection. When I returned home the ARC app had a message indicating it had not “seen” the Roon Server since I left the house. Thanks. Bill
We’ve identified the relevant error in logs from the listening session you reported from November 15.
At that time, RoonServer had been online for at least two days, and the machine hosting RoonServer had gone into hibernation and changed active network pathways several times.
A few suggestions to prevent the recurrence of this disconnection:
The Ultrabook is docked, but its sleep and power management settings might be limiting the availability of the network interface (Tailscale) to RoonServer. If this machine hibernates, RoonServer will lose its ability to authenticate ARC sessions. You might consider migrating RoonServer to a desktop machine, which will have more robust BIOS-level sleep/wake management settings.
In your router settings, disable IPv6. This is purely for diagnostic reasons and to streamline our log inspection.
Next, verify the port forward is turned off. Assign 0 or another number in the port number entry of Roon Settings → ARC until you see a “Not Ready” symbol appear. As long as Tailscale is installed and remains active as a network interface for both the phone and server machine, you can disregard this port forwarding test (it only tests port forwarding, not Tailscale).
This will hard-limit RoonServer to Tailscale in its attempts to reach ARC.