Ethernet Switch Suggestions?

Hungryhalibut posted:

Oh my goodness Bart, what have you said?

Shhhhh it's our secret that this networking stuff actually works!  Don't tell others . . . it'll ruin their fun!

Bart posted:

It seems that the OP solved his problems by the least intrusive alternative; a good lesson.  Look for basic conflicts or aberrant settings before embarking on more complicated solutions.  I sympathize; while I have had ZERO (touch wood) network issues for a couple of years now, I went through a phase where I was almost ready to buy a turntable ;-) and bring the cd's back out of storage. 

It's very easy, even with supposedly 'plug and play' home network components, to end up with conflicts such as two routers running creating conflicting IP addresses, two wifi networks running with various pieces connecting to one or the other, etc etc.  Its easy to string together parts that end up with a home network that works some of the time but not all of the time! 

I've run through a few different server solutions over the past year; UnitiServe, Minim on a nas, Synology's media server, and Asset on a nas. Now that I have settled on Asset, the rest are gone from the network.  All of my music library is on the same nas that runs Asset.  I'm delighted that the Naim App sees my network and both players EVERY time; I haven't seen 'cannot play track' and other such errors in months.  Touching wood . . . again.

Yes.... exactly... simplicity. I've been wanting to ditch the unnecessary 2nd wifi router and go with a simple pass through solution forever... it's just taken awhile and one too many networking s$#t-shows to finally get the motivation to deal with it. Everything now is working nicely and there will be no mystery (at least to me) issues to deal with moving forward... touch wood :-)

I've even gone ahead and ordered some Blue Jeans Cat 6a cables after reading another thread, because god forbid one could make even a simple change without spending at least a little money:-)

Exactly, streaming is and can be straightforward for most... It's just there are things you can do to make it work better should you need to... You don't have to put up with substandard performance .. and if it all works as intended that is great and I would like to think for the majority that is how it is.

A descent quality router with upto date wifi, descent switch(es) and wired connections go a long way..

Of course some rudimentary network optimaztion takes you in the same direction as dedicated mains connections and other such finesses.. Not necessary but certainly may be worthwhile if you want to go the extra mile.

Simon

Zipperheadbanjo posted:

Bart posted:

It seems that the OP solved his problems by the least intrusive alternative; a good lesson.  Look for basic conflicts or aberrant settings before embarking on more complicated solutions.  I sympathize; while I have had ZERO (touch wood) network issues for a couple of years now, I went through a phase where I was almost ready to buy a turntable ;-) and bring the cd's back out of storage. 

It's very easy, even with supposedly 'plug and play' home network components, to end up with conflicts such as two routers running creating conflicting IP addresses, two wifi networks running with various pieces connecting to one or the other, etc etc.  Its easy to string together parts that end up with a home network that works some of the time but not all of the time! 

I've run through a few different server solutions over the past year; UnitiServe, Minim on a nas, Synology's media server, and Asset on a nas. Now that I have settled on Asset, the rest are gone from the network.  All of my music library is on the same nas that runs Asset.  I'm delighted that the Naim App sees my network and both players EVERY time; I haven't seen 'cannot play track' and other such errors in months.  Touching wood . . . again.

Yes.... exactly... simplicity. I've been wanting to ditch the unnecessary 2nd wifi router and go with a simple pass through solution forever... it's just taken awhile and one too many networking s$#t-shows to finally get the motivation to deal with it. Everything now is working nicely and there will be no mystery (at least to me) issues to deal with moving forward... touch wood :-)

I've even gone ahead and ordered some Blue Jeans Cat 6a cables after reading another thread, because god forbid one could make even a simple change without spending at least a little money:-)

On the subject of simplicity, as per my earlier post, I still don't understand why you need to replace your AE with anything. Why can't you just connect your streamer directly to the long Ethernet cable that goes to your router?

Chris, indeed, I use my AirportExtreme TimeCapsule switch ports (as well as a stanalone switches for layout reasons) and they work fine... Underneath the covers I'd be suprised if the switching  chipset is not the same as for many dedicated consumer switches.

Simon

I have too much "stuff" on my little rack, so I needed a 16 port (unmanaged) switch.  I am picky about wifi, and so I disable the wifi on the broadband router that is supplied by my internet service provider, and instead use an Apple Airport Extreme to do just the wifi part.  Then there are 2 nas boxes (one backs up the other, and each is backed up to an external usb drive), Qute2, Apple TV, Samsung plasma tv.  There used to be a UnitiServe but that is with a new owner.  I keep a dangling cat5 cable if I want to connect my Macbook via a wired connection to do the Qute updates, but wifi has been fine.  And room for expansion I guess :-)

On the subject of simplicity, as per my earlier post, I still don't understand why you need to replace your AE with anything. Why can't you just connect your streamer directly to the long Ethernet cable that goes to your router?

 

Because I am also running ethernet connections from the switch to my Mac Mini and my Oppo 105 in addition to the NDX.

Zipperheadbanjo posted:

On the subject of simplicity, as per my earlier post, I still don't understand why you need to replace your AE with anything. Why can't you just connect your streamer directly to the long Ethernet cable that goes to your router?

 

Because I am also running ethernet connections from the switch to my Mac Mini and my Oppo 105 in addition to the NDX.

Fair enough; I assumed, given that it was replacing an Airport Express, which only has one LAN port, that you could only have had one device connected to it. If you need more ports, of course switch is what you want. The Netgear switch mentioned above seems to be the standard recommendation here, and it did a good job for me, although I have since replaced it with a fibre optic switch and cabling, which seems to work very well.

Hello,

I have a question regarding "IGMP discovery". My setup sometimes has issues with discovering the UPnP components. The naim app does find my naim uniti 1 in most cases, but in some rare cases it takes up to maybe half a minute after turning on or waking up everything. More problematic is that the BubbleUPnP app on an android smartphone usually does need several minutes to find the uniti and the UPnP servers on my NAS, especially minimserver, that is running on the NAS. Yesterday BubbleUPnP server, that is running on the NAS, too, took several minutes to find the uniti. (I use the BubbleUPnP server for qobuz streaming.)

Simon, the developer from minimserver, recommends to switch "IGMP snooping" off on all routers or switches. Unfortunately my router (a fritz box router) does not offer such an option. This is why I am looking for another switch to take out the router from the uniti<->NAS connection. On the other hand I have read that you need IGMP if running IP-TV or video streaming because the network will be under heavy load without IGMP? Also Simon (in-suffolk, here above in the naim forum) recommends to use IGMP for faster discovering!? Are there two different IGMP-things or isn't this contrary somehow?

Now my question is: Which router should I choose? Which options should it offer?

I have found a recommendation for zyxel routers. Netgear GS105 or a similar TP-Link router is said to often loose the 1GB/s mode, falling back to 100MB/s, if it is running several days without powering off. You have to turn if off and on again to fix this. But one of the zyxel routers (as far I saw) does not offer "multicast" support so that UPnP components are not discovered in the network at all. 

Now I am a little bit confused about choosing the right switch. (The switch must not be cheap, it has to work reliable.)

If it helps, this is my current network:

uniti ---- fritzbox-internet-router7490 ---- ASUS-WIFI-router ac66u ---- NAS

Other devices like TV, PCs, etc. are connected to the fritzbox- and to the ASUS-router as well. I am using the ASUS router for WIFI, because the fritzbox is located in the cellar, also the ASUS has the better WIFI, covering all rooms.

The network that I want to set up:

uniti ---- the-new-switch ---- NAS

                      |             \-----fritzbox-internet-router7490

                       \----ASUS-WIFI-router

So if the fritz box router is the culprit for the discovering issues, this might help because it is taken out of the network chain of devices that I need for streaming music.

The Asus RT-N66U has IGMP facility - You must configure 'Enable VPN + DHCP Connection' to 'No' or 'Yes' under the WAN option.

My router - like many others on the market - does not have such an option & is automatically enabled & has no option to enable/disable this feature.     

As a side story - my app lost the Naim "room" late last evening,  when I do get this I first suspect the (new)  router & (as usual) found my line sync speed had crashed at 2 to 8mb/s (it should be 52mb/s)   A router re-start restored it,  then it happened again this morning  ........ its either a router problem or a line problem,  the ISP is investigating (its the router but the ISP has the follow "procedures")          

Hi Gert... IGMP is a TCP/IP protocol for managing groups of hosts and routers so they can share common data. This common data is called multicast data and uses special IP addressing - quite separate from the IP addressing given by DHCP - effectively the group of components has a single special IP address. So this needs to be managed - and this is where IGMP steps in - it sets up, manages and maintains the groups - and this is where things can go wrong....and to make matters more difficult there are several versions of IGMP - although Naim in its latest firmware has expanded the versions it supports...

So in the perfect world your router would listen to devices wanting to create a group - and listen to devices to wanting to be in that group, (multicast discovery in our case) and the router would then manage this group and keep a list of devices within that group. Periodically the router would refresh the group to check the devices still want to be part of the group. However if the router doesn't support the right version of IGMP that the devices support - or support IGMP at all then this won't work. In this case the the applications need to manually broadcast out their group advertisements to see what responds and keep a local copy and this can take a few seconds and can delay discovery each tine its invoked

Now if some components like switches and switch ports on routers are supporting IGMP snooping - they will listen into into IGMP and work out what devices should be in each group. However if IGMP is not working correctly on your home network - the switch might not recognise devices are belonging to specific groups - and therefore they will block the IGMP refresh or discovery multicast advertisement (remember this data uses special  addressing) - this is why devices can 'appear' to disappear off the network when trying to discover them.

So a workaround is to disable IGMP snooping - the switch or router switch port will then try not listen to IGMP and will simply blindly rebroadcast multicast addressed data including discovery at the risk of potentially causing congestion and unnecessary noise on your network.

This method is also what a basic consumer switch such as a  Netgear GS105 will do.

Therefore  by using a router with IGMP snooping disabled on its switch ports - or a standalone basic switch such as GS105 to connect your media server/NAS and streamer will help with discovery - as its sidestepping this functionality at the cost of efficiency.

Your bottom diagram achieves exactly this - and a GS105 switch inserted will achieve this state. 

You may still have still small delays - because the router implementation of IGMP might not be quite right or the wrong version for your devices - there are remedies - but perhaps beyond the scope of this forum and require perhaps more complex network equipment. 

A long reply - but hopefully that answers your questions. But as you can see things like DHCP and IP addressing is quite separate from multicast group addressing and discovery.

Simon

Simon

You are a great resource and I have learned a lot reading your posts so I hope you will forgive if I say this last one was so far  over my head it gave me a headache. 

Cheers

Clay - in which case don't worry about IGMP - one way or another it will usually work with basic consumer network equipment for our simple uses such as streaming discovery    It was just that Gert had some specific questions to do with it and querying why it appeared to work the way it does  ....   

Mike-B posted:

The Asus RT-N66U has IGMP facility - You must configure 'Enable VPN + DHCP Connection' to 'No' or 'Yes' under the WAN option. 

I guess, because I am using the router as wifi access point only, I do not see this menu item. I can configure IGMP for wifi, but I do not know if this affects the LAN ports of the router, too. (I do not think so, because AFAIR you can dis/enable IGMP for WIFI 2.4Ghz and 5GHz separately.)

Hi Simon,

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

... IGMP is ... 

 Thank you very much for the detailed information. To sum it up I have two possibilities regarding the switch

1) choose a switch like the netgear GS105 that does not support IGMP at all

2) choose a switch that is doing everything completely right with IGMP and supports all IGMP versions of the protocol. Ideally IGMP can be turned off, in case it does not work as expected.

Two questions are left:

regarding 1): Is there any disadvantage you can notice in practice if IGMP is not supported? Are there only the mentioned multicast packets that increase the network traffic or is streamed data multiplied, too? I wonder because I had read that IP-TV strongly requires IGMP support in the network?

regarding 2): You recommend the Cisco2960 switch that is doing this all right? There are so many different of them ranging from 250€ up to 530€. Which one is the right one? Aren't there cheaper solutions that support IGMP in all versions correctly?

Maybe I try a simple switch first (solution 1) )

Gert, for a simple life on a small home network, your option 1 might be safest... Here multicast data is treated as broadcast data .. and that is that.

But yes if you are using multicast services such as perhaps IPTV then IGMP becomes more important, as it effectively prevents clogging up your home network, especially your wifi, with multicast data such as video to devices that don't need it... and wifi could get clogged up quite quickly... but with UPnP / DLNA, multicast is simply used for discovery purposes and so the data used is minimal, and so blindly broadcasting it is of little consequence.

With regard to question 2, IGMP is typically a protocol that runs between hosts and their router ( and between routers). The connecting switches or router switchports, on more capable devices, can run IGMP snooping... This simply is the ability for the switch to listen to the IGMP protocol and open the switch port to the multicast group data if there is a host/device that has registered to a specific multicast group connected to that switch port.

I use a 2960 because it supports snooping and can also runs an IGMP querier.. That is it forces a regular refresh of devices that registered to join a multicast group... With UPnP that means when I use Naim app, I instantly see all my renderers and media servers 100% accurately every time with no wait for devices to 'appear'. Some might not need to this if their router is doing this job well for them.. But for me in my setup it wasn't perfect and I wanted to improve this. I think IGMP snooping and queriering functionality is on all Cisco 2960 IOS versions.. and won't be dependent on the number of ports...

if you do get one, drop me an email, I can send you the Cisco config to enable this.. However if you are not at all familiar with configuring commercial managed network components such as the Cisco 2960 I won't recommend this.

Simon