How to get stable AirPlay with Sonos One?

​@vikingu, What does your network setting look like? Is there a WiFi mesh for example?

Hi ​@Hedy L.!
 

nope, no mesh or weird/inefficient bridges. I have a “core” switch of 10G, which connects my Internet router with a couple of 1G switches (with ports in every room of the house) and a few WiFi APs. Most of the switches are from Unify, with the APs currently from AVM/Fritz!Box&WLAN line-up. All the WiFi APs are wired in the “core” switch.

The only issue that I had a couple of times was, maybe not coincidentally, with wired Symfonisk speakers. They decided to reconnect on their own also on the Wireless network, which I guess was configured initially and in the app, but otherwise disabled for them. At a random time after months of being untouched in configuration, they wrecked havoc for a few hours until I managed to trace the storm of looped packets that they pushed between my Ethernet and the WiFi network. The loop made such a storm that I had ~60% packet loss. I reported this to Sonos support, since I don’t think that speakers should bridge and loop traffic between their 2 network interfaces. After finding the culprit speaker and doing a factory reset, they are fine now. To debug and get hard proof I mirrored the switch ports where the speakers where connected to another port, where I connected just a laptop with Wireshark. That showed clearly that the speakers were forwarding packets from the WiFi network to the Ethernet one, which then my APs put back on WiFi… and also the other way around, from Ethernet to WiFi. This didn’t happen lately, so I’m guessing that a fix was pushed.

This aside, every few months when I get supper bothered, I do a factory reset on the Ones and switch from whatever WiFi or Ethernet connection I had before to the other. Yet the issue appears again after a few days or weeks.

Cheers!

Thank you ​@Hedy L. ! I think there might be some helpful hints there related to Unifi. Some probably don’t apply to my case, but can try some for sure.

No VLANs, nothing weird, I hope...

​@vikingu, You're most welcome! 🙂

I just upgraded all the firmwares on my switches and looked for Multicast related configuration, unfortunately no luck.

Now I wonder if the Fritz!Box/Fritz!WLAN stuff for WiFi might interfere, but there are no such advanced options to configure those...

@vikingu, If you also have UniFi WiFi APs, then you should switch off WiFi on the Fritzbox, yes. This should enable UniFi as the actual home network, with the Fritzbox acting as a modem.

Today it seems that also  non-AirPlay (TuneIn from the Sonos app) is unstable after a while and stops. In general that was more stable, yet maybe it was just my bias.

I wish I could change the title of this thread now...

​@Hedy L. I don’t have Unifi WiFi APs since a few years now (just switches). I have switched all my WiFi 5 APs to Fritz!Box/WLAN stuff, since it seemed more cost-effective with WiFi 6.

But IIRC, also on Unifi WiFi + Cisco non-managed switches it was the same. I’m starting to think this is not related to the networking, since I have changed so much of it (changed homes).

I have also removed all my Sonos + Symfonisk gear from HomeKit, not just the Ones with issues. No changes…

I guess the next step would be to unplug all my Sonos things from Ethernet, I guess… but that would be ugly, as it’s always a compromise between coverage and performance with having too many or too few APs to cover all floors well.

@vikingu, You can avoid broadcast storms / multicast flooding by disabling the WiFi radio on each wired Sonos component.

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/disable-or-enable-wi-fi-on-your-sonos-products

If this does not work, we will need to perform a complete reboot of your home network to eliminate duplicate IP addresses and other potential issues.

I have disabled WiFi on all the wired ones. As I said before, randomly sometimes a couple of Symfonisk re-enabled and they mirrored all the packets, not just multicasts, it was a huge mess. I’ll check again in the app.

What do you mean duplicate IP addresses? Could there be issues if by Fritz!Box changes a DHCP IP allocation for a speaker? Should I try to fix the IPs? Would the speakers be configurable without DHCP, or my only way to get them fixed is to configure DHCP per MAC?

There must be a way for reliable broadcast storm / loop prevention, but I’m no expert.

Do you have wired and wireless Sonos speakers? If at least one of the wired units has its WiFi radio enabled, the system is running in a proprietary mode called SonosNet (a meshnet). If you don’t own a portable speaker (Roam or Move), you should remove the WiFi credentials from the system, they aren’t needed.

https://support.sonos.com/en-us/article/remove-a-wifi-network-from-your-sonos-system

If you’ve disabled the WiFi radios on every wired Sonos speaker, then you’re running the system in an Ethernet / WiFi mixed mode.

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During an update, all Sonos units reboot simultaneously and all request an IP from the router at the same time. Some routers are unable to cope with this. This can be remedied by reserving IP addresses in the Fritzbox.

https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-3490/201_Configuring-FRITZ-Box-to-always-assign-the-same-IP-address-to-a-network-device

But before that I’d recommend to do:

-- Fritzbox: Delete all idle connections

https://en.avm.de/service/knowledge-base/dok/FRITZ-Box-7590/262_Deleting-a-network-device-from-the-FRITZ-Box-user-interface/

-- Reboot the Fritzbox afterwards

1. Reboot the Core Switch and all devices (not just Sonos) that are wired to it, including the WiFi APs
2. Reboot the other switches and all devices (not just Sonos) that are wired to it
3. Reboot all devices (not just Sonos) that are connected via WiFi, including phones and tablets

I have checked and now have WiFi disabled in all wired speakers. One, in a pair, didn’t had it disabled, albeit having a cable plugged in.

I still have an Ikea Picture-Frame, a Play:3 and a Play:5 which have no cable and I’d prefer to keep on WiFi, but if this is the issue, I’d rather lose them. So I guess now I’m in that Ethernet / WiFi mixed mode.

I don’t think I have any issues with DHCP. I have, some time ago, expanded my 192.168.x.x/24 to be a /22, just to have enough space. I did now a Remove All Idle Connections in the Fritz!Box, just in case, but it looks good. All the Sonos/Symfonisk things now have nice names too and got them all identified by IPs and MACs.

BTW: I have also a very old Play:5, which my son uses as active speaker for his toys. But I only see this in the S1 app. And some Ikea remotes, one paired with the Sonos One with the issues. Unlikely, but could any of these be the culprit?

I’m not a big fan of rebooting all the switches. First you have to do it in a proper order, since they also do DHCP themselves and need to reach to router. I did though reboot the switches this morning, while I was upgrading them. Then TBH, it would be quite a pain to reboot my dish-washer too :-p… while I doubt that could be the problem. I’d try to try to change one thing at a time and see if it makes a difference...

It is quite possible that the culprit has been found. There must only be one DHCP-capable device, the Fritzbox. Or there are VLANs; I'm not familiar with those. The best thing would be to commission a network technician to take a look at your network on site.

I write networking software (for telecoms) daily. I understand the DHCP protocol fairly well, without ever actually writing a stack for it (for large networks we use something different, which scales to millions of devices). But I did had to implement a few DHCP options as extensions for it, so some many years ago I did read some of the IETF RFCs to it. Anyway, I don’t want to brag, but if I would need to hire a network technician, it would be an expensive one.

My DHCP is working just fine, I think. Of course, I don’t control the stacks that the Fritzbox uses, but it seemed to do a good job for about 20 years now. I also get notifications when there is an IP overlap, so don’t think that’s the case. Streaming between my phone and an Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, etc in my network with AirPlay or Chromecast seems just fine. So anyway, I’m starting to think that the Sonos Ones just have a buggy implementation, or service/process crashes in them.

Don’t know if it would help, but if someone would be able to dissect the proprietary Sonos/Apple protocols, I probably could take a long trace of one of the speakers, by mirroring the switch port that it’s connected to, and get a Wireshark pcap file. Since that would contain a lot of broadcasts from my private home network, I wouldn’t share it here publicly.
But I’m also thinking that maybe the speakers should have hopefully some logs, which would be more helpful, maybe? I just can’t find any, like I can’t either find an option to bypass DHCP (since we were talking about it), by setting static IPs.