Question

Setting Up Sonos With Two Wifi Routers

  • 3 January 2020
  • 6 replies
  • 661 views
T
Badge +2

I’ve seen that there are similar threads here, including this one and another one.  Of course, there is enough of a variation that I need to bring up this topic all over again.

I have a new house and, over 300’ away, is an old barn that was on the lot when we bought it.  The barn is now almost all renovated and being used as a recreation area and guest house.  Of course that’s far enough away that I need a 2nd wifi router.  Without going into details (and the people who don’t get simple things), I need to keep the house router and barn router with different SSIDs, but they have the same password.

So here’s how the network is set up:

In the house, I have my main internet connection that comes through the ISP’s router to my own PFSense firewall that also serves as a DHCP server.  The firewall has a CAT5 cable going to a switch and, from there, ethernet connections go through the walls to all over the house.  Whenever possible, I use a cable to connect a device rather than wifi.  All my Sonos devices in the house are connected through ethernet.  (I think I remember setting something once to tell them to use ethernet over, but I don’t remember how or if I really did that.)

The DHCP server uses the 172.16.xxx.xxx subnet.  I use an Apple Airport for wifi, under the SSID “HouseNet.”  The Airport acts just as an access point and the wifi devices are assigned IPs from the DHCP server.  Simple so far.  Everything, including wifi devices, is on the same subnet.  I have 6 Sonos devices on the house LAN, all connected through CAT5 cables.

I have a pipe I buried from the house to the barn that carries a fiber optic cable from the house to the barn.  I have converters at each end, so I have an ethernet cable coming out of the house ethernet switch, through a converter, to fiber, to the barn, where there’s another converter, then a CAT5 running to the ethernet switch in the barn.  From there, through cables in the walls, I have CAT5 running from the barn switch to all the devices in the barn.  I do have a wifi router in the barn, using BarnNet as the SSID.  It’s an access point, so the IP addresses are still assigned by the DHCP server and are in the 172.16.xxx.xxx subnet.

I have a Sonos Playbar, woofer, and two Play:1 devices to set up in the barn for home theater, along with 2 other Play:1 speakers in other rooms and a Connect to set up down there as well.  Today I connected a Play:1 to to an ethernet connection (in other words, it connects to the LAN that way, no need of wifi) and pulled up the Sonos app to add the Play:1.

At this point I had two different results.  (I tried this multiple times.)  Sometimes it saw I was adding a white Play:1, but there was no response when I pushed the button on the Play:1.  (Well, it chimed, but nothing else happened.)  Other times it wouldn’t even see that I was adding a Play:1.

I might add that tomorrow I’ll be double-checking connections to check if I might have a loose connection in the barn.

If I have a Sonos speaker hooked up through cable, will it still use wifi?  And if it’s on the same subnet, does it have to be on a wifi router with the same SSID as the house wifi?

What else do I need to check and is there anything I can do to get this to work?

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6 replies

J

Hi. One clarification first please. Your post seems to imply that only the forst two elements of the IP address are common to all devices. Is that correct? Do some differ in the third element (for example 172.16.0.xxx and 172.16.1.xxx)?

A wired Sonos device will automatically favour that wired connection over a wireless one.

ratty

Hi. One clarification first please. Your post seems to imply that only the forst two elements of the IP address are common to all devices. Is that correct? Do some differ in the third element (for example 172.16.0.xxx and 172.16.1.xxx)?

That shouldn’t matter, so long as the assigned subnet mask is adjusted to suit. The OP might want a larger address space than 256.

I’d be wondering about the Ethernet-fiber interfaces, and whether they’re handling broadcast traffic correctly.

 

J

Hi. One clarification first please. Your post seems to imply that only the forst two elements of the IP address are common to all devices. Is that correct? Do some differ in the third element (for example 172.16.0.xxx and 172.16.1.xxx)?

That shouldn’t matter, so long as the assigned subnet mask is adjusted to suit. The OP might want a larger address space than 256.

I’d be wondering about the Ethernet-fiber interfaces, and whether they’re handling broadcast traffic correctly.

 

Thanks for clarification.  That does seem most plausible, given the inconsistent (but never fully successful) results.

T
Badge +2

Hi. One clarification first please. Your post seems to imply that only the forst two elements of the IP address are common to all devices. Is that correct? Do some differ in the third element (for example 172.16.0.xxx and 172.16.1.xxx)?

That shouldn’t matter, so long as the assigned subnet mask is adjusted to suit. The OP might want a larger address space than 256.

 

It’s a 256 bit address space, but I didn’t specify everything due to paranoia.  So everything is on the same 256 bit address space.

 

I’d be wondering about the Ethernet-fiber interfaces, and whether they’re handling broadcast traffic correctly.

The ethernet-fiber interfaces are dead simple.  No settings, just plug CAT5/5e/6 cable in one end and singlemode fiber in the other.  I have used the DHCP server info to verify that when a device is connected to BarnNet, that it is issued an IP address within the subnet range by the DHCP.

I’ve also tested the connection down there in multiple ways:

  1. I’ve found that if an iOS device has a wifi connection, it uses that for data over cell, so if the wifi router can’t get to the internet, an iPhone using that wifi won’t be able to access a web page.  I’ve tested this by trying to load pages in the barn with my iPhone.  I could load a page with wifi off, then turned it on, with the the fiber converter off, and it couldn’t load the page.  Left the phone on wifi and turned the converter on and it loaded find.  So I know the connection goes all the way through from wifi to the internet.
  2. As I mentioned, I checked the DHCP server leases and the devices I plug in down there show up on the DHCP lease list (and in the proper subnet).
  3. I use Channels as a DVR.  It’s just software and it runs on a box in the house, connected to the LAN via CAT5.  When I’m down in the barn, I can watch TV using Channels on mobile devices, so I know any wifi device using BarnNet is talking to the devices in the house that are on the LAN.
  4. When I use the Sonos app on my iPhone, when on BarnNet wifi, it is aware of all my Sonos devices in the house, so it’s got a clear and good connection to my LAN and  the devices in the house.

So I feel I can say the ethernet->fiber->ethernet connection is five by five.

ratty

What happens if you set up the first Play:1 in the house, then take it to the barn?

Ref an earlier question it doesn’t matter what SSID the phone is attached to, so long as the Sonos system is on the same subnet.

T
Badge +2

I think I’m going to have to chalk this up to bad hardware - and not the Sonos hardware.

During construction, i ran all the ethernet, coax, and HDMI cables to make sure it was all done the way I wanted.  I double-checked all the connections and they were okay, so I didn’t think it could be hardware but, from comments here, that’s what it was starting to look like.

Turns out it was hardware - loose connections on the new ethernet switch I was using!  So I had to stick in a smaller switch that won’t let me finish it all, and return that one.  But once I put in the new switch, I got it all to work just fine.

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