For some time now, my iPhone and iPad typically will not connect to my Core unless physically in the same room. Once connected, I can leave the room and they behave fine, for a while at least. As I understand it, Roon uses my LAN exclusively (no Bluetooth), so I can’t imagine why being in the same room would be required. Any ideas?
My WiFi is strong throughout the house, and I have no problems streaming hires from my Core to endpoints three floors away. It’s just the GUI on the iOS devices that is temperamental.
Where are your wifi router and the closest mesh endpoint located? How are your Roon server/core and your endpoint(s) connected? As you say, Roon should use only Ethernet and wifi in your case, so the physical location of iOS device and Roon server/core in relation to each other don’t matter, what matters is their respective location and quality of connection to the router/wifi
Core, endpoints, and iOS devices all WiFi (and the endpoints work fine—it’s just the iOS devices). I have a WiFi node on every floor. The Core is just about sitting on top of one, yet if I’m downstairs next to another, my iPhone can’t find the Core!
@Bill_Swartz, on top of the recommendations from @DDPS and @Suedkiez, do you have a guest network or any secondary networks configured in your WiFi mesh system? Are you sure your iOS devices are connecting to the same network on which your Roon Server is running?
I do have a guest network enabled. I am absolutely sure everyone is on the same subnet. Let me reiterate that when I cannot connect from downstairs, the only thing I do is walk up to the same room where the Core is, and everything works. And the Wi-Fi signal is strong downstairs; I can stream internet video, which I am guessing requires more bandwidth than connecting to my Core from the Roon app on my phone.
The only other thing I can think of is that when I’m elsewhere in the house, my iOS device may be using another of my Wi-Fi nodes. I don’t know why that would make a difference, however—I can’t configure the nodes individually, and the endpoints don’t seem to mind in any case.
Gadnoz_Seek
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I find my iOS devices sometimes take a long time to switch to another node when using Wifi. When the connection is failing, do you see a weak signal strength on the device? Does switching the wifi off and on again help?
This has nothing to do with your SSID. It’s a setting in iOS that fakes your iOS device’s hardware address to limit tracking and it could be confusing your Roon core.
@DDPS, thank you for the “Private Wi-Fi Address” setting suggestion (and thanks to everyone who has responded!). I was unfamiliar with this, but now I understand. I will experiment with this. At this moment—of course—the app on my phone has been cooperating (thus the “typically” in the title), but I will try this next and report back.
Are the WiFi nodes running on same subnet as the main router and all iOS devices on same ssid? Possibly your connect it to the main routers WiFi when in that room then to your additional mesh in others and if it’s running its own DHCP server as is the case with many of these systems.
I think you’re misunderstanding what I mean. It’s a network discovery issue as you can’t see Roon over the network so something on your meshes router is blocking communications. Possible some multicast issue or similar. Having your core connected wirelessly is likely some part of it.
Quite right. Unfortunately, no convenient way to wire my Core. Ironically, everything seems to be working smoothly today. At the moment, the Core and phone are connected to different nodes.
@daniel, Thanks for this link. I will try this next.
In the meantime, when I last lost connection with the Core a couple days ago, I looked at the network connections (on the Linksys app), to find that my iPhone had disappeared from the network. This is curious, since the phone thought it was on the network, and in fact I was looking at the Linksys app on the phone itself, which sort of goes against the idea that it wasn’t on the network(!). Long story short, cycling Wi-Fi on my phone didn’t fix it, but cycling “Private Wi-Fi Address,” as @DDPS recommended, did work. In other words, when I turned Private Wi-Fi Address off and back on, the phone reappeared, with its original, private MAC address. Then it could see the Core again. (Incidentally, when Private Wi-Fi Address was off, the phone connected with its presumably native MAC address, indicating it was connected via ethernet—clearly it wasn’t—but Roon didn’t like that connection either).
So something isn’t quite right with my Linksys network, or there is something that spooks Roon. Still experimenting.