Hi Folks.
I have a Sonos Beam gen2 and a Sonos ARC. I’m using Symfonisk Lamps as surround pairs with both of these setups. I’ve switched from RSTP to STP on all my switches in order to accommodate the Sonos gear, and wifi is disabled on all devices.
The Beam2 setup is rock-solid, and I never have any problems. The Sonos ARC is a constant headache despite being similarly configured. Both are wired completely, due to living in an apartment in a city and having a terribly polluted RF environ. (I’ve tried using the products wirelessly, but they get out-of-sync constantly.)
What I’ve noticed (after troubleshooting) is that sometimes the Sonos ARC will drop off of the network due to losing it’s IP address. Sometimes it’s due to a link state change caused by STP which is another can of worms I’d like to discuss if anyone has insight into running a completely wired setup and accommodating Sonos’ old deprecated STP defaults (I’m using Mikrotik as my “core” routing/switching gear and have Netgear “access layer” switches.)
When the Arc loses it’s IP address, what I see at my DHCP servers (I have 2 dnsmasq DHCP servers with non-overlapping subnets) is that there are DHCP requests that are flagged in the logs as “DHCP packet received with no address.” Before I knew what was going on when the ARC would drop off the network, I would do this whole blind routine of rebooting devices and unplugging sonos gear, but now I know how to get the device back online pretty quickly:
I’ve realized is that if I restart the dnsmasq dhcp service enough times, eventually one of the servers will be able to assign an address to the Sonos ARC (i have tried with and without reservations - no impact - so I have gone back to reservations so at least i know what IP it *should* have when it’s online). And then it appears in the app after grabbing an IP again.
So! (I have been submitting diags to sonos, and I am going to open a ticket on this issue as well.)
All of that to ask: Is anyone else seeing similarly odd DHCP behavior? I suspect it’s due to the way the sonos products hide the physical interfaces behind a bridge so that they can transition from wired to wifi and use the same MAC. If so, any fixes?
And also: Is anyone else using the products all-wired and having good results? I don’t really understand why the almost-identical beam2 setup is so solid and my Sonos ARC has been unstable since day 1.