Major Issue with Wireless and Wired at the same time

See this thread.

If your Sonos system was wirelessly bridging a wired backbone it's most probably because RSTP path costs are in use, though it could simply be down to a flaky wired connection somewhere. To be honest I'm surprised at your comment about SonosNet that "it is not private at all". It's been common knowledge for years that the Ethernet ports on Sonos devices could be used to extend the network to other devices.

I'm sorry, but I don't really understand your point. There are no flaky connections and RSTP path costs (whatever that means) is not something 99.9999% of people putting Sonos on their networks would care about. The reality is that if there are 2 Sonos players wired to a network at different places (i.e. not directly to each other), then this spells disaster for the network. It creates circular paths to most devices on that network and god only knows what happens to the network packets. Most likely the network is going to get flooded, slowed down, etc. I can easily see a scenario where the switch sends a packet down a port, only to receive it back on another port, thanks to Sonos. And the switch will then send this packet again down its known port and get it back again, thus flooding the network with endless loops. There is no place for Sonos to be acting as a wireless extended of non-Sonos related traffic. This is a major issue that needs to be fixed by Sonos.

I take it you didn't bother to read the link ratty posted? Because if you had, you would have found the solution to your problem.

Yes, I did bother to read it and it is pathetic that I have to read a lengthy article of why Sonos may cause a network problem, and even more pathetic that I need to take the time and the effort to rectify a problem that should not have been there in the first place. That is not acceptable. If I wanted to buy a wireless switch repeater, then I would go and source it. I bought the Sonos system as a music player. That's it. If it decides to become something it is not, then it is a Sonos problem, not my lack of understanding of what I bought. This is a simple case of the Sonos not meeting its purpose and Sonos should fix this issue for other people that no doubt are experiencing major network issues unware of the cause.

It's actually quite easy to fix. However, you seem more concerned with complaining and blaming than actually solving your easily fixed problem. So I guess I'll go help someone else.

Well, I don't need your help as i fixed it myself already. So thanks for nothing. And you, instead of listening and acknowledging the issue, are hiding behind complex technical explanations. That's just silly, and does not help the average household user, who would not even get to this forum and will be frustrated with their network performance instead.

A SonosNet wireless mesh is a multiply bridged network. Sonos can and does automatically resolve network loops. It does so using STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), an industry standard method.

Because potential loops can also extend to the wired segments when more than one Sonos unit is wired, it's necessary in such situations for the wired paths between Sonos units to handle STP traffic correctly. If STP packets (BPDUs) are blocked the wired path goes undetected and the wireless path is left open, causing a loop.

Most network equipment behaves as it should, passing STP traffic transparently without problem. Managed switches may need STP support to be explicitly enabled. Known problems are listed here.

Your network components evidently didn't deal with STP packets as they should have. They were either mis-configured or non-compliant.

Just came across this year old thread. Gary - I am having a similar issue. For what it's worth, I totally understand and agree with what you were saying above. I'm sure you're over it by now, but I feel your frustration.

I just came across this as well after installing a new router. I was configuring the new router in my office which consists of an 8 port 1G Switch with a cat6 link to my main central switch which then is connected to my house router and then the cable modem. To configure the new router in my office, I disconnected my cat6 cable to the basement switch from my office switch, then connected to the URL 192.168.1.1 which SHOULD have been the new router, instead, the OLD router came up.... since I had disconnected the ONLY link from the office to the basement, how on earth could this be happening ? Turns out I have a SONOS connect hanging off one of the ports of the office switch and it was then connected via it's SONOS net wireless to the other devices which acted as a very poor connection from the office switch through the SONOS wireless to another SONOS connect or AMP to my basement switch.. HOLY SH&T... I was replacing the router because of very odd behavior recently and sporadic performance problems !! Well no wonder I was having problems !! The SONOS device is a CPE or an end point, it's not a network device and it should never pretend to be. The fact that it can support SONOS traffic across it's proprietary wireless network is nice, but it should NEVER forward anything from it's Ethernet ports across the wireless network, this is unacceptable behavior. I immediately disabled all of the wireless connectivity from any SONOS device with an Ethernet port that is connected via Ethernet and I have not had any odd network problems since. The fact that the only way to disable this is via a relatively obscure URL is also very concerning, this should be a CONFIG parameter on the SONOS app and it should be in huge red letters describing the affect it can have on networks if enabled. At a minimum, no SONOS device should EVER forward packets EXTERNAL to the device through the wireless network. Short of re-writing the code to disable this, SONOS should at least make the default behavior disabled.

Wow. Glad you figured it out. So what is the obscure url you can access to disable the wireless routing?