We manage the network for a high end audio store that sells your products. Their Roon Nucleus will drop the network stream while playing a station from any streaming service and disconnect from the iPad application. The station has to be restarted, as though it was never playing.
The device is hard wired to the network and there are no VLANs or complicated network configurations. It's a commercial network with a Fortinet Gateway and a managed network switch. The Roon device has a static IP address outside of the DHCP range. We've forwarded TCP ports 9100-9200 and UDP port 9003. We found the port information in your support community. It hasn't helped.
There are numerous other streaming media players in the store that are working without issue. The customer is using the same login information for the streaming services for all of the devices. It's possible that the services are detecting multiple simultaneous logins and that's causing the issue, but why would only the Roon stop streaming? I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.
Are there any network settings that could fix this?
Scott Quick, CTS | Project Manager
O: 412.212.7515
C: 412.719.4132
Synergy Media Group
Technology Design-Build
Proudly-certified SDVOSB
Describe your network setup
Not a home network. Fortinet K60D, Araknis 48P managed network switch with no VLANs, 2 Araknis 500 series access points
I use a managed switch just fine with Roon. What for, you may ask? Because the NAS my Roon runs on is using 802.3ad.
The basic premise with Roon’s warning is that managed switches are typically used for things that are incompatible with Roon, such as VLANs, which the OP has shared he’s not using.
I’m a little confused by his wording “forwarded TCP ports 9100-9200 and UDP port 9003” - there is no need to forward these ports; they should simply be open throughout the communication chain to the Roon server.
I would recommend that the OP just take simplicity into consideration, and make the port configurations that are involved in the communication chain as dumb as possible.
In general, Roon doesn’t play well with enterprise-grade next-gen firewalls or smart network switches. This is, broadly speaking, a consequence of the multitude of UDP and TCP processes relying on dynamic port assignment. However, there are other considerations to keep in mind that can be trickier to resolve, like the STP implementation. Troubleshooting these enterprise environments quickly balloons beyond the scope of our support due to the wide variety of firmware involved.
This depends widely on the router or firewall firmware involved, but a few come to mind:
in any mesh network, enable IGMP snooping even on a single VLAN. Some firmware won’t forward any multicast discovery announcements between nodes unless this setting is active.
Verify all multicast forwarding settings are enabled
Playback dropouts occur commonly from two mechanisms: a) packet loss/sample dropouts in the network connection between RoonServer → endpoint or b) RoonServer fails to buffer the content from upstream services (Tidal/Qobuz/KKBox) in time to distribute the audio.
Please let us know how else we can help. We’ll need diagnostic logging from this particular Nucleus to assist in any granular detail - the audio store can reach out via our dealer support channels directly if they would prefer expedited assistance.