Edit: It seems that the culprit here is actually my modem, DHCP doesn’t seem to work when the WAN goes down.
I discovered today that during internet outages that because Roon cannot validate my membership or access the cloud that I cannot play any of my digital library which is on an internal samba share in my NUC running ROCK. I also discovered that I cannot access that library over my internal network when the core cannot validate my membership.
I live in an area that traditionally has pretty stable internet access (I work from home so I need it to be reliable) but sometimes outages occur - two today and my core was offline as a result of both of them.
I know that cloud services would not work, but is it really necessary to be that rigid on membership checking? Is it possible to check membership status periodically and if the past few validations were valid continue to allow play until he next successful validation out to some reasonable limit like 48 hours? It would be a sort of fail safe for those of us who may find our infrastructure failing time to time. (We live in an area that is randomly subjected to some fairly wild weather and it seems to be getting worse which affects our utilities from time to time.)
membership is only checked about once a month. So roon should function without internet most of the time. However there does seem to be a bug where iOS devices fail to control Roon without internet access. See this thread.
I’ve become aware of another possibility and it might be a quirk of the Arris Surfboard modem I own. I am wondering whether the problem is actually that the modem’s DHCP server stops working when the WAN connection fails? I can investigate further this week-end.
I use a ARRIS surfboard modem, but I don’t use it for DHCP addresses. I have a router attached to the modem that handles the DHCP IP address assignment. My advice is to add a ROUTER off your modem.
I use foobar2000 on my laptop, with attached USB drive for travel. It’s free (and very good/flexible music player). https://www.foobar2000.org/download
I’ve just purchased a Ubiquiti Networks Amplifi which is a wireless router, I’ll be reconfiguring the Arris Surfboard in bridge mode in the coming days and will report back on the end result. With winter coming I am hoping to reduce my dependence on an internet connection in order to be able to access the resources on my internal network when cable goes down.
I would suggest assigning static IP addresses to ROCK and NAS.
And configure DHCP server to start assigning dynamic addresses from certain number.
That way, if you use static IP addresses below that number, you should be good.
FWITW , I shut down all power overnight, its our Summer and we suffer horrendous electrical storms which can fry electronics, (another story).
When I switch back on in the morning the internet connection takes a few minutes to stabilise, during this period Roon has trouble starting. Once stable , ie the Internet light on the router.
An official comment some years back was that Roon checks in your account occasionally but will happily run without an internet connection, That has not been my experience
Maybe @Support can comment on the current position as the previous statement was a few years ago.
Of course its easily tested by unplugging your router temporaily.
I determined some time ago that when I had no WAN connection that my gateway, an Arris Surfboard was unable to route/assign IP addresses on my LAN. I had literally no connections to anything on the network, the problem wasn’t with Roon at all, but with the modem/gateway. I have a friend who had the same problem and solved it by adding an external router.
I installed my Ubiquiti Networks Amplifi Alien wireless router today and reconfigured the Arris in bridge mode and turned off its internal radios.
I can 100% confirm that the problem discussed here is NOT a Roon problem, it’s completely the fault of my former gateway device. Disconnect the WAN connection from the Modem and it now continues to play.
The other benefit is that the Alien connects a whole lot faster to devices requesting a DNS address and other resources. Typically we have between 9 - 15 devices connected to the system at any given time, 5 of them are hardwired over optical ethernet, the rest are wireless.
This weekend, internet went out for 20 hours. For the first 10 or so, I was fine playing from our local library. Then Roon suddenly quit and forced me out in the middle of a track. It was asking for a sign-in, which I obviously couldn’t do. This is really annoying - we should be able to play from our local library without connectivity.
