Whenever I open RoonServer on my Mac mini over a wired connection, it kills the internet on multiple Orbi satellites. I can still connect to the LAN network but the internet is only accessible from the main router at this point. I can reboot the satellite while Roon is not running and everything will begin working again but as soon as I re-open Roon, the internet drops out. I have tried to research this online and have found similar problems with connectivity to Roon on an Orbi network but nothing that specifically mentions the internet dropping out entirely due to a conflict with Roon. I have factory reset my entire Orbi environment (router and satellites) and it's still occurring. Again, this is only occurring over a wired ethernet connection but this Mac is used as a server for multiple other services (Plex, backup, etc.) and I need it to remain wired. I've also looked at the ethernet port settings and they are standard full duplex without any green energy settings involved. One oddity is when the internet drops out, it drops out for 2 of the satellites but remains active on the satellite the server is connected to along with the router. Any devices connected to the other two satellites lose internet connectivity.
Describe your network setup
AT&T fiber gateway running in bypass mode to a Firewalla Gold box which is acting as my network router. Orbi router is in AP mode and I have 3 satellites connected to the Orbi router.
Hi @Greg_Doering,
Thanks for writing in to us about this issue. I’m not familiar with the Firewalla Gold box but upon researching it I see it’s a router with security features in it. Can you ensure there’s no security rules blocking Roon?
In case this isn’t the problem I’d like to clarify some things about your network setup. Does this diagram accurately reflect your network setup?
I don’t have any security features enabled on the Firewalla that would be blocking Roon. I used to run Roon on a Linux box without issue and had been running Roon on a Mac with only minor connectivity issues (remotes not finding the core on occasion). Nothing has changed on the network until this suddenly started taking down the mesh satellites in my Orbi system.
A RoonServer startup will prompt a cascading device discovery process across the network. Airplay and Google Cast endpoints, to name a few, rely on mDNS for their respective broadcast announcements. RoonServer will send its own multicast announcements, too.
If you have UPnP enabled in your router, then port forwarding setup stack in RoonServer will also communicate with the router to configure a port forward within the router’s firewall.
Within the network topology you’ve presented, the symptom you’ve described - the shutdown of the Orbi mesh node firmware - has three possible culprits:
mDNS/multicast announcements are causing packet size issues, flooding, or IP conflict that overwhelms the Orbi firmware. Since most endpoints will be announcing frequently regardless of Roon’s activity, this is unlikely to be the single cause, but one we can’t rule out as a factor.
Firewalla’s L7 firewall, which statefully inspects traffic, sees all the new packets coming from RoonServer - particularly the port forwarding requests to the router - and shuts down the network to strangle a potential intrusion. We can’t rule this out until we A/B test without the Firewalla or at least adding Roon as a security feature. But unless Firewalla recently updated firmware, there’s nor reason to suspect it’s interfering here. We can likely rule this possiblity out.
The third possibility also relates to port forwarding - if you have other services using port forwarding via UPnP or NAT-PMP (Plex, etc.), too much competition might be overwhelming the NAT table.
I’d additionally recommend that you uncheck “Disable IGMP Proxying” and make sure multicast forwarding is enabled in the Orbi settings.
To know more, we need logs from the RoonServer machine. So far, we haven’t been able to reach the server instance to request them. At your convenience, pleas use the MacOS instructions within the directions found here and send over a set of logs to our File Uploader.
Appreciate the reply. I don’t see an option for “Disable IGMP Proxying” in the Orbi web interface. I suspect that’s because it’s in AP mode which pulls out most of the available options. I did see an option to turn on IGMP Proxy in the Firewalla app and enabled that. I just fired up Roon on the Mac mini and it hasn’t crashed the satellite after 20 minutes of uptime. The outages were happening instantaneously before so I’ll wait and see where it goes from here. Thanks for your help.
Hi @Greg_Doering,
Great we’re glad Roon seems to be working properly now! When you’re confident that everything is stable please mark this thread as solved.
