Managed Switches & Streaming Problems

The answer is simple - unmanaged switches

You really do not need managed switches for something as simple as a home audio network

Email HP to request the steps needed to disable the managed functionality in your switches to turn them into an 'unmanaged' one.  Also explain you have 2 and how they are connected - i.e. there might be a critical order you have to proceed with the steps.

Very occasional, apparently random periods of music dropout occur in my HDX / NDS system - as far as I can see in my system they are caused by my HDX doing some indexing of large NAS based music folders.

This may or may not be of any relevance to you, of course, but I offer it for your consideration.

PS - I assume you've established there's nothing else outside the audio system clogging up your network?  (e.g. kids or SWMBO streaming movies?)

PPS - ...and that your network is secure enough to prevent your neighbour(s) also streaming via your network 

I suspect what Sonos has suggested is nothing to do with what you are expieriencing, unless Sonos are aware of some specific interoperability with your specific switches. Ie yes a red herring.

Most higher spec 'managed' or configurable switches have a feature called Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) enabled by default. It is a capability that stops network loops and consrquential data storms, and allows switches to be wired resiliently  or in a 'mesh'. It works by dynamically breaking the loop at a defined point by probing the network switch devices with BDPU frames.

However  if you connect a single ethernet link to the Sonos Connect, and don't use any other wired Ethernet connection to any other Sonos device, I can't see how you will have any loop. If you do have a loop I recommend enabling STP on the switches.

i use Spanning tree protocol on my main Cisco managed switches and Sonos works fine.

I would be more tempted to ensure muticast broadcasting and IGMP snooping are disabled on your switches. If your router doesn't support IGMP well your switches may be getting confused.

Sometimes it is better to use more basic consumer equipment unless you can 'see' what is happening and suitably enable the correct functionality. Ultimately if still stuck you will need to enable logging on the switch and see what, if anything, is the state change when you have problems.

Simon

that should read, multicast broadcasting is 'enabled'  and IGMP snooping 'disabled' if an option in your switch. This makes your switch act more like a basic consumer device for multicast traffic.. Such multicast traffic is used by UPnP and AirPlay control protocols.

Thanks for your replies.

To clear a couple of questions: our network is secure (WPA2-PSK) and I have been experiencing these issues while it's just me at home and with nothing else running but Sonos. 

Last weekend I was at my wit's end.  I twice worked backwards to close-down every IP device in the house, then the switches, then the router, then the modem, then forwards to re-boot them all in sequence, waiting for each one to finish re-booting before doing the next - and still I had the same issue.  This has been my remedy for the problem to date and usually it works though never permanently it seems. 

For reasons as mysterious as the cause of the problem, for the past week everything has been absolutely fine.  As frustrating as it is not to know why the problem is happening, it's somehow more frustrating not to know why it suddenly solves itself.  I probably need to get someone to look at the logs for my router (Netgear R7000) and switches (HP 1810-24G).

We have a hardwired house (Cat6) and my plan is to connect all my Sonos units (currently four) by Ethernet.  There is a break somewhere in the cable to the kitchen where two units reside (one does the kitchen and the other the garden) and until the break is fixed these two are running wirelessly while the other two are wired.  Perhaps temporarily I'm better just having one wired and the other three wireless? 

Curiously, when I log into my router and look at the list of attached devices, all the Sonos units appear as "wired" even the two that are wireless.

According to Sonos, the Sonos mesh incorporates its own STP and Loop Protection and they were most convinced that anything similar in a managed switch would clash with the Sonos protocols.  They said this was the case with any managed switch and at one point they sent me the instructions for disabling STP and Loop Protection on a Cisco switch in the hope that I could translate them for my HP switches.  They had me completely convinced too, until I logged onto my switches and found that both STP and Loop Protection were already disabled.  Maybe per Simon I should try enabling these on my switches? 

Unfortunately I can't see any options for Multicast Broadcasting or IGMP Snooping on either my router or my switches.  My router has an IGMP Proxy option (disabled) but it's a WAN thing not a LAN thing.

I think I will get an IT guy to diagnose our network and reconfigure as necessary.  I probably don't need managed switches but I don't want to go ahead and replace them and find I've still got the same issues.

Here's something a bit odd (to me anyway).

When I look at the log for my router, I get a long list of events most of which look like this:

"UPnP set event: Public_UPNP_C3] from source 192.168.1.16, Sunday, Feb 08,2015 11:06:28"

That source is my wife's laptop and she doesn't have anything media-related on it so I don't know what the UPnP thing could be.

Then if I look at the log for my switches I get, for both of them, a great long list of the following:

"User Login Failed for admin"

These entries are every few minutes, all through the night while the house is sleeping.  What could that be all about?

No that log entry looks unrelated and quite normal. Many things use UPnP, not just media services.

"Perhaps temporarily I'm better just having one wired and the other three wireless? "

This sounds the best option to try... Certainly if you suspect the Sonos implementation of STP on the Sonos system is affecting things.

BTW STP is a standardised protocol, and is designed to have different devices / vendors share the Spanning Tree.  On switch to switch interface connections it is usually NOT recommended to disable STP, but on interfaces to edge devices it usually is disabled as it is usually irrelevant for these ports and otherwise it can take quite a long time for the switch port to activate once enabled or a device plugged in.

Thinking about this.... If you have STP switched off with your current setup... I don't know what the HP switch functioanlity is... But if it is not sending BPDU frames back out on the other Sonos connected port then I can see how problems might exist and why the Sonos could get confused... Though I would expect it to happen fairly rapidly... Anyway without logs it's guess work.. But it is worth enabling STP, or at least the handling of BPDUs, if you can, to see if things improve... (Again you are mimicking a basic consumer switch by doing this)

Maybe I am wrong, but I don't believe that Sonos does a standard TCP/IP protocol and network. Their network technology is proprietary so a smart managed switch may very well be an issue as Sonos is doing stuff on the network that would not be expected under normal circumstances.

FYI, there are good unmanaged switches around for well under €100. I use a TP-Link with 16 ports myself.

Multicasting is located Advanced>Setup>Lansetup>Lan TCP/IP setup>Ripversion>RIP2M on the R7000.

Getting a profession diagnosis is probably the best way to a solution.

My original post said un-managed switches were the answer, sorry I should have been a bit more specific.  What I should have said was IMO you did not need managed switches installed from the get go, I'm not sure what the installer had in mind .... but won't go there.  Whatever, you have them & maybe best keep what you have if they are not the problem.  I would ask your IT peeps to do whatever is possible to simplify the switch functions & set it all DHCP.   I agree with Pepsican,  Sonos are set to work on simple home systems & have an enviable reputation for reliable fit & forget operation.  

It might well be that the problems are not in the switches & that the same problem would remain even if un-managed switches were installed,  its just that an un-managed switches do not have added complexities as do managed switches & are one less item to go wrong.

pepsican, Sonos do use TCP/IP and they use STP. Sonos appears to use a customised implementation of UPnP to function.  However there does appear issues with HP and Sonos on STP interoperability, and from memory wearing may professional hat I don't think Sonos are alone..

http://forums.sonos.com/showthread.php?t=29677

As as I said, best avoid if you can, use a single wired connection and Sonos wireless to its devices.

Simon

Thanks Simon.  I'll try unplugging all but one of my Sonos units, then re-booting them all so that I have just one wired unit and the rest wireless.  If it solves the problem then frankly I don't care how and why (assuming I could understand the science anyway) so long as uit does.

Something else that may or not be related: I occasionally get dropouts from Qobuz and the Sonos screen will show an error message "unable to play xxx the track is not correctly encoded".  Query whether this is a problem with my system or Qobuz?  I have it on a fairly regular basis with one particular album: Mein Beethoven by Dieter Ilg (nice jazz piano versions of Beethoven numbers).  I'd be interested to know if you have any issues with it but please don't force yourself to listen to something you think is awful.

Thanks Gerry Mcg.  I have now enabled Multicast Broadcasting on my router.

OP - a very easy test would be to substitute in an unmanaged switch (or 2 if you really need 2; leave the managed switches out of the network) and see if that remedies things.  Buy from a store / online vendor with a liberal return policy.

Seems a lot easier than trying to diagnose symptoms in hardware you very likely do not need anyway!

Endless, I think that is an issue with Sonos/Qobuz.. I see it occasionally, but only when I am getting the Sonos to do a lot of searching etc.. So might be a Sonos bug.

Simon

Fingers crossed everything seems to be working well for the moment - I was even able to stream the above mentioned Qobuz album that has consistently given me trouble.

I have enabled Multicast Broadcasting and maybe that made a difference.

I have also disconnected the Ethernet cable to one of my Sonos units, so that only one is wired and the other three wireless.  When I did this, one of the previously-wireless units was fine but the other one started flashing to show that it had fallen out of the network.  Could the problem have been that one wireless unit was synched to one wired unit and the other wireless unit was somehow synched to a different wired unit and that was creating a clash? 

I found a www item on Multicast/IGMP  & it has a sizable list of the popular ISP & commercial home wireless router/hubs. 

The vast majority all have this automatically enabled & no option to enable or disable,  so it looks like you are in a good place. 

Mike, indeed using IGMP a router can enable a multicast group. That is it recognises a set of hosts in its subnet that belong to a specific multicast group/stream and routes appropriately onto another router if required. A more advanced switch may support IGMP snooping. Here the switch looks at the multicast traffic and decides which port should be active in for a particular multicast group/stream.. Rather than blindly broadcast.. Which could be very inefficient and clog up a network.

However if there is something not quite right in the configs on the router and switches or there is an interoperability issue it can all end in tears. Therefore for a small home network one can trade efficiency for an  increased chance of success and blindly broadcast out any traffic going to the multicast address ranges. Therefore consumer home switches typically broadcast multicast traffic.

Simon