· I use my ISP's router alongside a personal router.
ARC Status
· ARC is *Not Ready*
Roon Error Code
· None of these are listed. It simply says "TIMEDOUT" or similar.
System or third-party *firewalls *or *antivirus software* can sometimes block RoonServer from reaching ARC.
· Try adding RoonServer and its associated processes to the whitelist of any firewalls or antivirus software you have installed, including the Windows system firewall, if applicable. [You can learn more about firewall exceptions with Roon here.](https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/firewall)
Has the status in Roon -> Settings -> ARC changed after adding exceptions in your firewalls and antivirus software for Roon? ARC is still *Not Ready*
Don't give up yet.
· I'm stuck. I'd like to create a post to ask Roon Community for help.
Describe the issue
Roon ARC stopped working recently (I don't know when or which update). I did NOT change my network settings or software settings.
Describe your network setup
I've had ARC working for about a year; I made no changes to my network or configuration, but now Roon is saying "not ready" with this error:
This is just an obfuscated version of the WAN side ip address that ARC is told to use to contact your Roon Server. This ip address starts with 66. but the remaining octets are hidden by Roon (and replaced with aaa.bbb.ccc) so that you can copy and past the diagnostic text to this forum without compromising your security by publishing your ip address (which could be used to mount attacks of various kinds).
You do not appear to have uPnP or natPMP enabled. Since you stated that ARC was working, this implies that you have an explicit port forwarding rule in place. If this is the case, has the ip address of your Roon Server changed recently. If the network (or devices on it) were powered down for a period longer than the DHCP ip address lease time, then, when they are powered up, they may be issued with a different ip address. This could make any explicit port forwarding rule inoperable because the connection request is now being forwarded to the wrong device or even a non-existant device.
You should look at your port forwarding rule in your router and check that the destination ip address still matches the ip address of your Roon Server.
If, indeed, this is the cause of your issue, you can avoid this happening again by using a DHCP reservation on your router to ensure that the router always issues your Roon Server with the same ip address. This has all the advantages of setting your Roon server to use a static ip address whilst still retaining the use of DHCP to obtain ip addresses - which makes moving your Roon Server to a different network (for example, when changing your router) much easier.
Almost all RoonServer host machines can support Tailscale installation. It’s also easy to install on iOS and Android. You can then create a proxy-mesh VPN that bypasses your ISP’s implementation entirely.
This is the workaround we commonly suggest for CG-NAT or enterprise-grade network environments where port forwarding becomes impossible.
For the record for any future searchers, it was a quite-obscure configuration problem that my ISP made…
It turned out that the IP my traffic was coming FROM was not the IP that has the open ports on it that I set up for forwarding; so when Roon was trying to poke back in from the source of the traffic, it could not get in. When the proper IP was restored, it worked.
A fix/preventative for this (obscure) problem, and likely a few other similar ones, would be to allow us to manually set the IP address that Roon should look to, just like we can manually set the port.
And thanks for the Tailscale recommendation; I love it and use it a lot. I have not been very successful getting Roon to work with it, however.