Roon authorization is a bit flakey

Whenever my Roon Client on my phone or laptop gets updated, it first prompts me to “Choose my library.” Below it shows my server with a “Connect” button, but when I try to click on it, it just takes me to an “Authorizations” page rather than connecting as a remote. If I then click on “Oops, I meant to run as a remote control” it just takes me back to the “Choose my library page.”

The only option seems to be to click the “Unauthorize” button for my server, which somehow works. It connects to my server and the problem seems to go away. I have a lifetime membership. There’s no way I can easily replicate this. It just seems the whole “Authorization” thing is very flaky.

I have 1.2 build 128 on my server (Ubuntu Linux 12.04), and same for my laptop client. The same problem happens on my iPhone; however after I clicked “Unauthorize” from my laptop, my phone was able to “Connect” to the server without forcing me to re-“Unauthorize”.

I have seen this, too, with the latest (1.2) build. Never used to happen.

John, are you using Linux build as well?

Let’s get @mike or @brian to check this out.

Cheers, Greg

@jhwalker – are you using linux as well?

Is your Roon able to save settings / databases to the filesystem? It sounds like it’s forgetting the authorization.

I don’t think that is the problem because I just tried restarting the service and then reconnecting from a client, and it worked fine. Also all the roon processes are running as root.

It could still be a readonly filesystem, but I’m guessing you aren’t doing funny stuff…

I asked the question because this is the line that points me to an error:

The remote should have remembered that you were connected already, and when you relaunched post-update, it should have either reconnected to the same server or at least told you it was having trouble connecting. It shouldn’t have gone back to step 1 where you are asked to choose.

All bets are off on everything after that – the authorizations thing is probably a symptom of this initial issue.

Can you reproduce this at all? I quickly tried and couldn’t. I’m going to have our QA team try now – they are better at breaking stuff than I am.

I’ve been trying but can’t seem to reproduce it. It has happened a few times now, but not often, and since clicking “Unauthorize” seems to fix it I haven’t thought much about it. It does seem to be a server-side issue, because when it happens all clients do the same thing. And as soon as I click “Unauthorize” from one of the clients, all the others connect and go back to where they were with no problem. Also on the client that I use to click “Unauthorize” it immediately goes back to where it left off before – same album, etc that I was viewing from that client.

I just had a similar experience, can’t figure it out.

I was initially running RoonServer on a NUC, authorized there, worked fine for the last month.
I installed RoonServer on my Synology, de-authorized NUC, connected via a Roon Remote to Synology, initialized, pointed to music library on local /volume1 and ran fine from there yesterday.

I installed a microRendu today, brought up Roon Remote on my iMac to play music, and it can’t find the Synology now. I brought up Roon Remote on the NUC, and it couldn’t find the Synology, nor could my phone. All 3 thought the Synology was authorized. I uninstalled and reinstalled RoonServer on the Synology and still no joy. Then I de-authorized the Synology, re-authorized NOTHING, and RoonServer on the NUC started up and ran fine. Still no idea why the Synology connection was completely lost though. Weird stuff …

Not finding the roon server has nothing to do with authorizations. That’s all about networking.

Fair enough. Nothing in my local network and Synology has changed, so I’m a bit puzzled as to how the Synology RoonServer was there one day and just disappeared the next. I switched back to the NUC as the library and it all works fine again yet I didn’t re-authorize anything.

The Synology networking stack may be limiting your discovery packets, or it may not even be coming up properly. Just because nothing changed on your end, doesn’t meant nothing changed.

This tells me your Synology Roon never really got going.

Yes, I wondered the same thing. I checked the log on the Synology several times and there were messages saying it had authorized there. I also powered off the NUC entirely, using an iMac and my iPhone as remotes, it successfully connected to and played tracks from the library on the Synology.