Contributor I

Major Issue with Wireless and Wired at the same time

16 replies
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I have a number of Sonos amps around the house, with two being connected to different switch ports. My network kept slowing down, dropping out, then coming back on again after a few moments. Basically, my whole network was virtually unusable, and this went on for months. Eventually I traced the issue to the Sonos system on my network. When I unplugged a whole floor in my house from the switch, I miraculously could still see the servers on that floor, be it with an incredibly slow response. WOW. I traced this to the Sonos systems being connected wirelessly and passing my normal network traffic between them. This created 2 separate paths to many devices on my network: 1 via the hard wired switch ports, and 2 via the wireless connection on the Sonos. Who would have thought that Sonos acts as a wireless bridge for my standard network traffic. It seems that this caused to intermittently drive my whole network traffic through a much slower Sonos wireless connection, which I measured at around 5 MBPS because of the distance between the two of them on separate floors. Once I disabled the wireless on the offending Sonos amp and let the wired network do the job, the problem disappeared and the network is working as it should have been.

Reading the Sonos documentation stating it having a separate private wireless network, it amazes me that it is not private at all. What a terrible issue Sonos created for my family for many months after I put the Sonos amp on a different switch port.

Wireless

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ir8trader

Lyricist II

Someone had posted this in this thread, my apologies for not crediting the author, but essentially the SONOS devices all apparently have a web browser of sorts built in where you can do some additional configuration not available via the config option in the SONOS app. I went to "http://192.168.1.49:1400/wifictrl" and it came back with a page entitled "WiFi Control" which gave me a choice to select "On", "Off" or "Persist Off". I selected "Persist Off" and all of my problems disappeared. I did see some of the replies from others on this thread about spanning tree and that the SONOS OS runs RSTP and therefore it "should" not be a problem unless your router/switch doesn't participate properly, but also as someone previously mentioned, who on earth would have EVER thought that a media player could masquerade as a 3 or 4 port network switch/bridge and require a cooperating network switch to ensure no network problems occurred ? This brings up a whole host of other questions like how do you ensure quality of Service for your music flows when you're also acting as a network bridge for all of the traffic being bridged on eht0 and eth1 over the same wireless link ? Does SONOS want people to use their CONNECT and AMP as a remote wireless network switch ? I can;t imagine that this was the intended use case for the developers. As long as you have ti in there, then fine, leave the functionality there but at least make it "Either/Or", if there is a wireless link AND an ethernet link to the same network, then disable the wireless NOT BY USING spanning tree since this is obviously not reliable as my network and many others have discovered, but by simply setting the port forwarding status to off on the wireless whenever LAN connectivity is active. BTW, many many years ago I troubleshot bridged networks and had to debug spanning tree issues, they can become very complex very quickly and each vendor behaved a little differently, enough so that interoperability while assumed was never guaranteed and there are simply too many options for home network switches and router/switches to feel comfortable that your device will be 100% reliable in virtually any environment.

Some of the other commands using the http interface are located here: "http://bsteiner.info/articles/hidden-sonos-interface"

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dptdpt

Contributor I

Ok, thanks. I’ll check it out. I think I already did that, but it was a while ago and I want to verify. Regarding spanning tree protocol, you only need to worry about STP support if there actually exist multiple paths on your network. If all your sonos boxes are wired, why on earth would you want them to route any packets at all? That would just slow things down. As you and others have said, I want my network to work as designed, without having sonos try to “help” me by adding new paths in the nw.

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dptdpt

Contributor I

So I just went through all my sonos boxes. One weird thing is that when you first bring up the wifictrl page, it always says the Wi-Fi is on, even if you just turned it off. If you click “off”, it will say the Wi-Fi is disabled. But if you refresh the page, it is back to “on”. So, assuming you can actually turn it off, there’s no way to go back into that page to see what the current setting is.

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ir8trader

Lyricist II

I think the url I added above may give you some additional detail, in it they reference "http://:1400/support/review" which supposedly allows you to check wired and wireless network connection status as well as other things. I'm away form my home LAN now so I can't test it.

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skavan

Contributor II

Having a similar problem. Great big new build house. Multiple managed switches (10). Two Sonos Connects. I've been having intermittent traffic slow downs, internet falling off a cliff for an hour. With so many switches and devices it was quite a task to get to the root of it which seems to be the Sonos was communicating on wireless AND wired and doing the monkey business listed above. Simply unplugging the wired cable to the Sonos seems to have cleared up the issue...but I would rather use wired than wireless.

reading all the comments above suggest there are three options:
1. Hack the url to turn wireless off.
2. Do the tree spanning config (no idea how to do that)
3. use wireless only and leave the sonos wired connections unplugged.

So, my questions are:
a) Are those the three options?
b) Of the three, what do gurus recommend.
c) If the third -- how the heck do I learn how to do that? All my switches are Netgear GS108v3, GS108v2, JGS516PE, JGS524PE

Thanks in advance-who would have thunk it!

s.

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Michael Bender

Avid Contributor I

One troubleshooting tool that I installed with my 16-player Sonos installation at home is to put a TP-Link WiFi controlled AC outlet on each player. This lets me remotely turn on and off each player individually when trying to isolate a problem, and lets me turn all the players off and selectively turn them back on if my system gets completely confused or when I'm working with Sonos support.

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