I was recently away from home when TIDAL suddenly became unavailable on my Roon ARC. I could still use TIDAL from my TIDAL app on my phone, so it wasn’t that TIDAL had locked me out of their service, more a Roon thing.
When I got home, I opened a Roon Remote and TIDAL was again unavailable. I logged out/in to TIDAL again from the Roon Remote, and while the music would now play again, it still wasn’t right, with recently added artwork for music not there, and the “Metadata Improver” telling me it couldn’t contact the Roon Server.
Solution, of course, was a Roon server reboot (mine is on an Intel NUC), which in this case I did by cycling the power on the NUC.
My question is: How could I have done that remotely, while away from home? Just an extra option in the settings on the Roon ARC app “Reboot Roon server” would have made it possible, but I couldn’t find anything. I think this should be added.
I solved this for $200 by purchasing a used Apple Mac Mini and set it up as a Roon client for my Nucleus. I’m using Splashtop to control the Mac Mini with my Dell laptop. I can reboot the Nucleus, if necessary, as well as reconnect Tidal and/or Qobuz.
This is one of many great use cases for a VPN. There are multiple ways of achieving a VPN connection to home, some routers have VPN server functionality built in to them or you could go with something as small as a Raspberry Pi. With RoonOS you should have been able to connect to the web interface of the server and initiate a reboot. Alternatively, if you are running something like Windows on that NUC then you could have a remote desktop connection setup. Then there is the last resort method, I have a number of power strips around my house that are controllable over a network connection. Just like the “brute-force” worst case scenario of the old “power switch option” I can cut and restore the power using a web interface.
That’s genius, and I love it so much! Although, I wish Roon was a bit more stable so it wasn’t necessary. But, it’s excellent software, so I can’t complain too much!
Thanks. I got the idea from @Rugby. I also just installed the free AT&T Smart Home Manager app on my iPhone so I can also reboot my router remotely. That’s about all I can do. The rest is up to Roon.