These things happen for all kinds of reasons. I think what’s going on is that when you turn on your VPN, it connects to a server somewhere that blocks your access to Roon’s servers, so Roon thinks you’re not on the Internet. Can you say more about the VPN? Is it a company thing? Is it for Internet privacy? Is it so that you can get back to your LAN from a remote location?
I use Roon Core on a Windows 10 machine with ExpressVPN as well. The only time I ever have networking issues at all on the machine with the VPN running is if I try to use anything other than OpenVPN via UDP. If you don’t know what that is check your protocol options in Express VPN. I always go back to it no matter what because it always just works. Split-tunneling breaks more things than it fixes, it doesn’t get the routing table quite right.
Semi-educated guess, but it sounds like your problem is related to your Express VPN configuration: https://www.expressvpn.com/support/troubleshooting/restore-lan-access/
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I take it all back that I was unlikely to get any helpful help on this topic here in Tinkering. I discovered this myself “tinkering” late last night but hadn’t yet posted since I wanted to be sure that the fix was for real. That is exactly the setting that I discovered and Roon now works again. Of course it is slower with this protocol but I can live with that.
Nevertheless, what I wrote is true. This was never a problem with Roon for me until a few weeks ago. It worked perfectly with the faster protocol, so something changed with Roon as well, but as long as this works into the future, I will stop complaining, about this issue anyway. Thank you Dale and Aaron too since you were also pointing me in the right direction.
Glad you’ve managed to get it working again. But you’re going to hate me…I just looked at my config (when I replied yesterday I was nowhere near my PC), and I’m using Lightway UDP protocol and my Roon Core works fine. Networking issues are a PITA and this is the sort of nonsense they cause. I’ve found during my tinkering sessions that even the “order” of doing things get’s you what you need, for example, I got ARC working with my VPN by disconnecting the VPN so that ARC could do its thing, and then reconnecting ExpressVPN. ARC still works like this for me, even though the ARC settings page says otherwise.
My ISP uses CG-NAT and IPv6, so I too need a VPN to use ARC. I use a different VPN (Mullvad) and like Dale need to start Roon prior to turning the VPN on to get ARC to work. The only difference is after connecting the VPN and looking at the ARC setting Roon, there are no errors, and it does say Roon is ready to use ARC
Yes this approachj used to work for me but totally stopped working a few weeks ago. The only thing that has worked is changing the protocol to OpenVDP via UDP. Keep this in mind if your current setup suddenly stops working at all…
But order is definitely important.
Of course there could be a ghost in the machine too. Tinkering some more tonight, now Roon will operate with Lightway UDP protocol which it did not before, but ARC will not work if the VPN is activated no matter whether I start Roon before activating the VPN or not. I don’t use ARC yet so haven’t paid much attention to this, but did change my router settings so ARC does work if the VPN is off. We each seem to have different results and conditions. Fun!
Today’s update has changed things again. Now Roon Remote won’t load on my devices with VPN active on the Core machine. If I disable it on the Core, Remote loads and keeps working ok even with the VPN turned back on.
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