I’ve been hunting for a solution to the “Metadata Improver Paused” issue with the Roon server on Linux (Debian). It appears the issue occurs because Roon doesn’t know the network is available. The roonserver.service file includes the line “After=network-online.target”.
This should mean that the server is sure the network is available at startup. Even so, I still see that that the metadata improver ends up paused. Should the service file also include “Wants=network-online.target”?
This may help…
Interesting.
Some folks say that to make the network.online.target more reliable, both lines (After= and Wants=) should be included. (Who knows?) If it’s a bug, there’s little to be done. I’m sure this isn’t high up on the Roon list because clearing the problem by restarting the server locally is a reliable workaround. I’m guessing this isn’t a problem with ROCK because it has its own proprietary method for checking things instead of leaning on systemd.
I believe this is a bug in RoonServer. It doesn’t just happen on system boot when RoonServer comes up before the network is fully online and Internet reachable. It also happens after the Internet goes away for a bit (such as when your ISP has an outage). And Roon NEVER recovers on its own. You have to restart the roonserver service manually to fix it. Roon should figure out when the Internet returns on its own and automatically recover.
(FWIW, my Roon Core runs on CentOS.)
That makes sense. I hadn’t considered that an outage might have the same effect. At least a developer can now look at this thread and see what the problem is. In the meantime, I’ll just restart the service when it needs it.
This does not happen on Ubuntu Server 20.04 or 22.04, so it’s not so clear that it is a Roonserver bug rather than an issue with service startup sequencing in some Linux distros.
Debian lags Ubuntu quite a bit on what they call a “stable” release, so it’s possible it’s a weird systemd thing that’s been fixed in Ubuntu but remains pending in Debian. Roon seems not to recover if the network link drops and comes back, so there might be something there, too.
I hope the Roon team has looked at this thread!