Sonos regularly dropping NAS library

A few years ago I had a “cranky” NAS library. Actually, the drive was telling me that it was getting ready for the recycle bin. I wasn’t paying attention and eventually the drive completely failed and complicated my life a bit.

An S1 SONOS system requires a NAS to be configured for SMBv1. An S2 system can use SMBv1-3. Sometimes a drive firmware update will disable SMBv1.

I have intermittently had this problem for several years, both with S1 and S2 based Sonos systems.  Recently, when I tried to update the library, I would get a message that the library was no longer available.  The network share was still in the music library dialog.  I tried to delete and readd it, which is when this project went off the rails.  I tried several times, first with one Music directory and then a smaller subset of the whole library.  The system would start to add the share and then fail after between 2 and 5 minutes.  I finally had enough and called Sonos. 

The experience was not good.  It was obvious to me that they were reading from a script.  They advised me to turn on SMB V1.  I advised that I was not interested in exposing my system to undue risk from a deprecated version of SMB and that Sonos documentation recommends not using SMB V1.  I also advised that my NAS was configured to support V2 and V3, both of which Sonos claims to support.  He could not get past that his internal documentation stating to use V1 and could not give me a good reason why I should take on that risk, so I asked to speak with someone with more networking knowledge.  I was advised that I would receive email with information about setting up a follow up call.  To date, no such email has darkened my inbox.  This experience was a monumental disappointment.

I suspect that Sonos, not unlike many, many other businesses, has difficulty maintaining an intelligent customer service force that if fully informed on everything. Having managed my fair share of CS, it’s certainly been the case in my life. I wouldn’t imagine that they’re hiring engineer level folks for this kind of thing, so I’ve always expected a certain amount of “never heard of that, but here’s what the script says”.

However, if you end up talking to someone who understands, CS can be extremely useful, such as I had the opportunity to experience a while back, when updating a CONNECT:AMP which hadn’t had it’s firmware updated in long enough that it took a special build, as I couldn’t run a normal update on it. It took my CS rep a couple of minutes to diagnose the problem, and come up with a solution. 

NAS support for SMB v1 is required for Sonos systems that run S1. SMB v2 and v3 work with S2 Sonos systems. 

There are some NAS’ that obfuscate, or make it impossible to make these changes in SMB versions, and others where updates are sent out with a software update to the NAS, without any informing of you, the customer, that there’s been a change made. Kind of frustrating, it was for me, at least, until I figured out what Western Digital had done, which took hours and hours of investigation, mostly because I was focused on it being a Sonos thing, and not a change in my NAS settings…..since I’d not been told about them switching out the SMB versions on me. 

Since then, I’ve moved my Sonos system to S2 (and given away my S1 only devices) and it’s not something I worry about.