Well something has gone belly up so I need some help.
I have an original naim uniti, with latest update although not the latest board which allows tidal and all that jazz. For the most part over the years its been pretty solid, occasional drops of internet radio but always rock solid on upnp network audio.
Over the past few months, radio has become piss poor. I only really listen to radio 4 and can pretty much set my clock to the drop outs I will experience.
But very recently UPNP has gone belly up as well. Opening the god forsaken naim app results in one of two states searching for the device itself or searching for UPNP servers. Although in fairness I have another upnp player on the network struggling as well. Sometimes after an age like a minute as long as you keep prodding the iphone to stay awake it will find a sever (I have a number to play with only one at once though, jRiver, windows, LMS. All have worked just dandy in the past.
Thinking it was my relatively new server set up, I swapped out the OS drive for an SSD and put a dual port intel gig nic in there. Still no good.
I have experienced other oddities on the network in terms of discovery. so am reluctant to blame the uniti. i.e. network scanner not picking up all my devices, my wifi access points not showing in the scanner, shares not showing on the mac etc.
To try and isolate this I went nuclear.
I swapped out the main 48 port switch for another 48 port switch. No change. (I managed to make this the only switch, no daisy chaining)
I swapped Untangle Router for PFSense Router. Same hardware. Things from here took a nose dive. Uniti now cannot hold a stream either radio or upnp for more than 20 seconds. I swapped the ethernet cables, ethernet points, updated firmware, turned off for an hour, put music on a different server, you name it, I have done it, no dice, its borked.
Most other things sharing on the network are fine, PLEX is rock solid, jRiver is able to fetch music from the same place as the untii cannot, no bother (though not on UPNP)
Anything else I can try, I consider my self above average on networking. I networked the house, run my own custom router etc. I have kept things simple, no cable aggregation, jumbo frame malarky or anything. But this just has me stumped.
Posted on: 19 March 2017 by Simon Frequency
Hi Gary,
I am sure you have checked through your route admin and displayed the DHCP table that all the devices are visible and have valid ip addresses?
Could you temporally simplify the network to cover the Uniti, UPNP servers and wifi + internet access - to remove the complexities?
Lastly, could you transport you Uniti to a friends home network (or to you Naim dealer if they are near by) and test it on a network that is know to be working.
After that I too am stumped
All the best in fixing the problem
Posted on: 19 March 2017 by blythe
If you can make it simple by removing (temporarily) all switches, just have the Uniti and NAS plus a single wifi access point, then if that works, add the switch with no outbound cables, then add one cable at a time.
Pain in the backside but it sounds like the only way to really get to the bottom of it.
I had a similar issue but with a managed switch, we were able to identify what had been dragging the whole system down. It was a damaged cable.
Posted on: 08 April 2017 by garyi
Well as an update I did quite a few things recently.
The first thing is my server died last weekend, it was an old 2900, like really old and I tried to fit a newer raid card so it would see larger drives, the backplane connections were flaky and one snapped in the swap out, so I considered it was time to retire her. I have built a new server based on an i7 cpu I had lying around.
This server carries the music amongst other things. I have a 6 month trial of server 2012 to see how it gets on.
I swapped out the switch in the loft. I ran four lengths of good quality CAT6 from this switch to my office where I have the uniti amongst other things. Here I put a same gen switch as the loft and aggregated the four runs. What a difference it makes! No real speed increase in terms of throughput but for file transfers its a consistent 114MBs with no up and downs.
I upgraded the uniti to latest firmware, and returned to UNTANGLE for routing.
I also got some of those BT whole home wifi devices (They are fantastic, and from bt!)
The outcome is, the uniti is still bolloxed. I think its time to blame the uniti now. It will drop connection on iradio every 20 minutes. Fine, I get that.
But it will drop connection on music serving, every 20 minutes. Just drops it without warning or any attempt to reconnect just says input initialising.
At this stage I am giving up on its internal capabilities. I have a spare squeezebox lying around which is rock solid so that will take up internet duties! It sad, but the uniti is getting on a bit, its first gen.
Posted on: 08 April 2017 by Simon-in-Suffolk
Just try to stream from a local source such as a laptop running directly to the Naim... (you might need a pass through cable and will need to control from IR remote) .. does that work, or does it still pause stutter? If it does then yes time to suspect the Naim.
Might be worth trying to clean Ethernet connectors.. a bit of dirt could drop it down to half duplex on the link establishment phase. Also check on your switches you have no duplex mis matches that have crept in.. you will need to interrogate switch stats to confirm...shouldn't be an issue with 1000BaseT, but can be troublesome on 10/100BaseT that Naim use .. best to check
Yes Etherchannel or other aggregation protocols work well, and can hugely increase network link performance , certainly with Etherchannel you can optimise to match your usage to some extent.
Posted on: 08 April 2017 by rednotdead
Interesting, just come across this thread. I have exactly the same symptoms with my first gen uniti - iradio and UPNP dropping regularly with 'interface initialising' message. I ended up replacing all cables, switches, and routers in an attempt to troubleshoot. I connected the uniti direct to my router (mikrotik 750) to bypass all other infrastructure, I replaced the mikrotik with a BT homehub, I tried the uniti on wifi - none of which improved the situation.
I updated my uniti from 3.3 to 4.4, which went without a hitch. Still the problem remained, but now I also had a 'Fault 59' message every morning on the display, regardless of which input the uniti was on. I also did a complete factory reset.
In all of this, nothing had changed in my network or infrastructure, or my NAS, it has been 'as is' for 5 years. Only the uniti started playing up, all other network devices (laptops, FireTV, servers etc) are fine. I recently added an Amazon Alexa - this will stream radio all day long, the uniti drops the same radio stream every 20-30 minutes. The drop outs are driving me nuts so today the uniti went back to naim (£330 +VAT thank you very much) with a detailed description of the fault, my network, and my troubleshooting. If they come back to me and say "it's your network" then I will want to see their evidence - I think my network is a-ok, and working in LAN/WAN I like to think I have a better than average knowledge.
