The entire LAN network on the Orbi gets taken down momentarily. Devices all state at that moment in time that they have lost connection to the network. I can also see it on my Uniti devices, they say they are not connected to the network. Then a second or so later everything restores itself. Only then the Roon playback is stopped and I have to manually restart it as there seems to be no form of buffering in the Roon implementation.
And this only ever happens while I am streaming from Roon. Any other use, including native streaming on the devices never triggers whatever this is. Or if they do their buffering implementations handle it perfectly.
And the Orbi logs have nothing in it at the times of the event.
And because of how random it is I am unable to properly trace it. It happens enough to ruin my experience but not enough that I can actually start eliminating things. I mean I cannot unplug other devices for up to three weeks.
Sounds like itās creating a broadcast storm some how. I did read the orbis had an issue with this at startup as they have wireless and wired active at once so it caused a network storm and loop. Wonder if itās related. Do they have any Igmp or multicast settings?
Yeah, thankfully I am not the only one with these kind of issues haha.
The settings have been set to the recommended settings as per the Roon forum.
I am not married to Orbi, but need a mesh wifi as any wired solution will mean gutting the house. I can tell you if I had a guarantee that a NUC Core and any other mesh system would sort my Roon issues AND give me the reliability Orbi gives me in my working from home and other applications I would invest in a second. But right now there are too many unknowns and other mesh systems come with their own problems.
I have heard good things about eero quite a few user them but I guess all these mesh systems really depend on your environment for stability. Personally I have never found Netgear stuff very reliable and itās handling of Roon remote on Android was not good when I had one of their routers. Avoided them ever since and never had an issue works all the time with no issues.
Moving to a dedicated core is something I would recommend above all else though just takes away the crap other os can add to the mix. Rock just works and never needs any babysitting really. One user has rock on his Orbi and doesnāt have the issues you do. But it could be one device that Roons communicating with thatās either looped somehow and taking it down. I would double-check all your hardwired things are all correct and not using both wired and wireless at same time, that could cause a network loop. I take it laptop has wireless off when you have it connected?
Yeah I am definitely no Netgear fan. The lack of support is enough to make me shop elsewhere the next time.
I am pretty sure. The Roon Core is in airplane mode with wired ethernet. That would mean that the issue would be with my Naim devices but they auto switch off wifi when wired.
All other devices and usages do not trigger this issue.
Also in the Orbi network list I donāt see any device duplication under wired and wireless.
How old are your orbis? Reading some stuff back from 2017 when they first added Ethernet backhaul and that caused the issues you seem to be exhibiting from certain devices connecting.
Do you have any switches in your setup if so where are they situated and what are they?
Does only one have a wired backhaul? If so try turning of daisy chaining. This might be relevant that I found on their forum.
I too had this problem with V2.1.4.16 and ethernet backhaul. I am running in AP mode behind a R7800 router.
The ethernet backhaul network must be dedicated to your ORBI devices. If you have a switch between your main unit and satellites, no non-ORBI devices can be connected to that switch. When ORBI devices see packets on the backhaul network segment that they didnāt originate, those packets are forwarded to their other non-backhaul network interfaces. If your switch is connected to both the backhaul and non-backhaul networks, youāve created a switching loop and the network grinds to a halt.
In my house, I have a long ethernet cable run from where the ORBI router is to where the Satellite is located. That cable is connected to ethernet switches on both ends where I connect other wired devices. When I connected my ORBIs to each switch with a single cable, I created two backhaul networks: one provided by the ORBIs and the other provided by the switches.
To fix, I just connected the ORBIs between the switches instead of āoutsideā them like so:
Router ā Switch ā master ORBI WAN port ā master ORBI LAN port ā Long dedicated ethernet run ā Satellite LAN port ā another Satellite LAN port ā Switch ā other ethernet devices
The important thing is that each ORBI unit has two ethernet cables connected. One for the backhaul network and the other for non-backhaul traffic.
My bandwidth tests with iperf3 show no performance hit between my two switches with the ORBIs in the middle. Wireshark confirmed a happy network.
I think the Netgear wiring diagram cited by the OP did not expect anything else to be connected to the switch between the main ORBI unit and the satellites.
I have found these solutions already in the months I have been at this problem. I cannot wire the backhaul for the very reason that I need a mesh wifi in the same place. House will need rebuilding inside.
I even tried adding a switch between the core and the Orbi a while back. Currently no switches.
And your core has DHCP reservation to maintain a fixed ip? Just reading that itās DHcP server can also cause some issues. More I read the more they really seem to be Iāll thought out product.
Oh wait you said the Core. No that is one thing I have not yet done.
Butā¦ I have a lot of devices in home and they all work and never cause this. I know this in itself is not an explanation but sometimes when I see some suggestions being made for settings on this forum when almost everything out there just seems to work it makes me raise an eyebrow. I do not think the software in high end audio is quite as robust as some others.
[EDIT] This is not a dig at your suggestion. It is certainly worth a try.
I donāt mean turn it off DHCP I mean to assign the core a DHCP reservation so itās a fixed IP address. Donāt do this on the core itself it should be an option in the router to select any connected device and set it to reserve that ip for it going forward. Just that the orbis seem to have some issues if you get a dhcp clash with two devices vying for the same ip it creates an ARP broadcast storm and takes it all down. It may not help but it seems to for some users of orbi.
Normally broadcast storms which this really does sound like come from faulty equipment or a network loop with one device or more feeding back to itself.
Does the main orbi get fed from a modem or another isp router of any kind?
It is worth a try when I have a moment to do it, thanks.
If there is faulty equipment it can only be the laptop the Core is running on. That is the one factor. The issues happens with multiple Uniti devices and no other devices or usage patterns cause this. So it could be solved by upgrading to a NUC but yeah, will have no way of knowing without throwing money at it.
It could also be a specific thing in my setup. Who knows.
Yep itās a hard one to diagnose without having some decent network diagnostics, does the orbi give any indications of whatās taking it down in its logs? Perhaps using wireshark might be able to help diagnose.
The Orbi logs donāt have any information on this. I also inspected Windows logs on the Core to see an event there coincided but nothing.
That is another good tip. As long as it can run on the Core. Issue is that I cannot predict the time when it occurs so whatever is monitoring should:
Be running already
Not affect performance or security of my network
To be quite honest I am getting to the point where the effort / money required to fix this issue is starting to outweigh the benefit of the one tool. In my mind, in any case. If Naim had a native solution for desktop control / management of the devices I would have switched off my Roon already. That is the last bit I am clinging to.
Is the DHCP server on your Orbi running? Is the DHCP server in your ISP supplied router (assuming thatās what itās connected to) disabled, as well as itās WiFi? Ignore this is you are up to speed with these settings, but they are often incorrect either because users are unaware of you to configure them, or because the equipment does not allow these basic settings to be adjusted.
I am by no means 100% sure that this is relevant to your problem, but since consumer mesh devices have become conmon it has become increasingly common to see connection issues caused by their being incorrectly configured.
I have no Wifi router from the ISP. Itās a fiber modem. Connecting directly to it with the Orbi.
I am reasonably sure that the Orbi has been correctly configured. It is also maybe important to mention that Roon worked without any problems for almost two years with the same Orbi configuration. The dropouts only started a few months ago. The only changes made were firmware upgrades to the Orbi and software updates to the Roon Core.