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Amazingly enough there is no guidance on how to set-up a SONOS system in a vLAN on an enterprise grade network. (Apart from this brief statement about STP.)

Currently we have the following set-up:

  • Firewall cluster (2x Cisco Meraki MX100)
    • Core switch VSF (2x Aruba 5406R zl2 chassis switches)
      • Access switches (20x Aruba 2540 switches)
        • 18x SONOS One SL in vLAN600 (untagged)
        • 2x SONOS Play:1 in vLAN600 (untagged)

We created five groups in SONOS with a couple of speakers attached to it. Using the alarm functionality the music in every group should stop and start automatically.

We have RSTP implemented in the network and that works like a charm.

Problem is: the SONOS system randomly stops playing (a couple of times a day).
You can directly start it again via the app, but it is very annoying.

We're completely in the dark:no STP events in the logs, no warnings/errors in the networking connection from ISP, no errors on the firewall etc…
SonosNet is disabled on all devices, everything is wired.

To eliminate the ISP connection, we even set-up a 4G connection exclusively for the SONOS, but that also disconnects occasionally.

Supposedly there is someone out there that has experience with SONOS on Aruba systems? (Ours are Central managed, but that doesn't change a lot afaik.)

Hi.  The lack of guidance from Sonos is perhaps a little less amazing when the following is considered:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/126?language=en_US

Unsupported network setups and devices

  • Wireless internet connections such as satellite, mobile hotspots, or LTE routers
  • Guest networks or networks that use a portal login page
  • Networks using wireless range extenders 2
  • Ethernet over Power (EOP) devices
  • WPA/WPA2 Enterprise

Hi.  The lack of guidance from Sonos is perhaps a little less amazing when the following is considered:

https://support.sonos.com/s/article/126?language=en_US

Unsupported network setups and devices

  • Wireless internet connections such as satellite, mobile hotspots, or LTE routers
  • Guest networks or networks that use a portal login page
  • Networks using wireless range extenders 2
  • Ethernet over Power (EOP) devices
  • WPA/WPA2 Enterprise

Thanks for your reply.

However, apart from the temporary use of a 4G router, I can't see how our set-up should be unsupported. It also behaved like that when it was serviced via the regular ISP connection.

Note that using the 4G router was only a temporary measure to eliminate the fault being our ISP. I am not going to bring in another ISP on a 3yr contract just for a small test 🤑.

In the meantime we swapped back to our normal ISP configuration (since the 4G setup didn't resolve anything) and it is still the same thing…

Any ideas?

Here are some setup considerations. Maybe SONOS quietly started supporting RSTP, but traditionally they only support STP.

Here are some setup considerations. Maybe SONOS quietly started supporting RSTP, but traditionally they only support STP.

Hi, thanks. I also mentioned that link in my original post.

Afaik (and my knowledge might be draining after all those years 😀 ) RSTP is an extension on 'standard’ STP and is fully backward compatible with STP. I don't know of companies that still have standard STP enabled, since it drastically decreases the user experience. Most have RSTP or MSTP implemented.
See eg. this explanation about types of Spanning Tree.

If you disabled wireless on all your Sonos devices, I’m pretty sure (R)STP shouldn’t be a factor as it’s not used. What sources do you play? Maybe test with some local music stored on a PC/Mac/NAS to rule out any ISP/Firewall issues.

Problem: Sonos stops playing a couple times a day.

 

Looking at this at a very basic perspective.  What’s the application?    If there is no interaction with the music service they will generally stop and timeout after a few hours.  Could the answer be this straightforward? 
 

 

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