First of all here are my system specs.
Windows 7 Pro
Latest downloaded Roon build (sorry I forgot which one) as of this morning.
Using an Apple Time Capsule with 2TB of storage.
Problem:
Whenever I run Roon on my system (Laptop running Windows 7 Pro) all of my other computers loose network connectivity as I see an error on the router. This includes computer hooked up via WiFi and Ethernet. If I don’t run Roon, everything is just fine. This did not happen before, it seems to have started after the latest updates. Not sure what to do, its driving me nuts. I like Roon and would love to turn this trial into a paid subscription, but not with these issues. Any ideas?
Hi @Albert_Jimenez ----- Thank you for the report and the feedback. To help me accurately evaluate this behavior you are experiencing, I’d like to gather a bit more information about your network configuration / topology. May I ask you to please provide the following information:
Are there any other networking devices in the chain of communication besides the router?
Can you please confirm how the core is connected to the network (wifi or Ethernet)?
Are there any other devices connected to the router?
Are you making use of any network related software (VPN, VOIP etc. )
Has this always been an issue while using Roon or is this a recent observation? If it is indeed the latter, can you think of any changes that have been made to your setup since noticing this problem, besides the most recent Roon update? No detail is too small.
Yes, I have the XFinity Modem which I connect the Apple router to directly via Ethernet. There are two other Gigabit switches along the way. My network is basically Gigabit.
2)Core is connected via Wifi, have not tried directly via Ethernet.
3)Yes, one computer via ethernet, the rest is all Wifi.
4)Well, not on the machine Roon core is installed on. The other machines do run VPN connections, Skype, etc.
5)Recent observation, and I cannot remember any changes made besides the most recent updates.
If you have more question let me know, I will be happy to answer.
Right now I am trying something different. I am installer the Server on my Windows 10 Pro machine, and will try to control it remotely using the Windows 7 Pro machine. See I have a USB DAC connected to the Windows 7 machine and I listen using headphones. Its a Audioquest DragonFly Red.
Interesting enough, I just decided to turn off Wifi on this laptop and connected via Ethernet and connectivity has been good for the last 10 minutes. So it must be something between Roon controlling over Wifi. Or there is some serious issue with my laptop’s wireless card/driver.
Roon uses a technology called multicast for device discovery. Multicast has been around for decades and is a very stable solution for the problem of trying to discover things on a network. In its simplest configuration multicast traffic gets repeated to every device on a network and the devices that aren’t interested just ignore it.
Problems arise when networking gear attempts to be smarter than it is and tries to determine who really needs to receive the traffic. This can work very well for large networks running on real hardware, but all of the switches, routers, and WiFi access points need to be working in concert. In home network gear this is rarely the case.
What’s most likely happening is that your Apple router is seeing a lot of multicast discovery traffic coming from the core that is destined for another WiFi device and it assumes that this can’t be right. In a worst-case situation multicast on WiFi can turn into a packet storm and cripple the network. One of two things was likely happening. Either the Apple router reset its radios in an attempt to prevent a storm or the storm actually happened and that took down the WiFi portion of the network.
I will occasionally see similar behavior on starting Roon on my iPad (everything else is wired) where the access point gets concerned and resets the entire WiFi network. This is extremely infrequent for me and it’s likely due to a bug in my access points. I’ve been too lazy to update their firmware.
I’ve had way too many issues with the Apple AirPorts and Sonos / UPnP that I stopped using them a couple of years ago. Everything has been much better since then.
Well… I’m a bit of an odd duck… I’m running a SonicWall router (no WiFi) along with Ubiquiti WiFi access points and Cisco switches. This allows me to do some interesting things between home and work, but it’s a ton of money in hardware and can be a management headache sometimes.
I’ve had decent luck with the newer generation Cisco/Linksys WiFi routers and have a bunch of the EA6300s that I use for building test environments. I know some swear by the higher-powered Netgear stuff although I’ve seen some multicast-related reports with those. The Apple stuff has been problematic as they often make firmware changes that break something which worked previously. I had a Sonos installation go absolutely nuts after an Apple firmware update.
I’ve been out of the consumer network gear for years now so I’m quite a bit behind on what’s current and not. Most of my clients already have something in place and I just work with whatever that happens to be.
Where are you located Albert? Best way is hard wire wherever possible. The newer mesh routers are very effective, but performance issues can still occur when the bandwidth is overloaded. I use Eero mesh - I’m in the United States.
My network is pretty loaded up. I have four Eero mesh routers, Four Linksys 8 port gigabit switches, Five Ethernet over power modules, and some hard wiring in place. About 30 items are connected to the network. I just added a single Cat 6 line from the office to my media room, and it made a huge difference in performance.