​@Canaryyella do you have any rooms aka zones or is it all single speakers?

I have one “Games room” zone, the rest are single speakers

I spent many, many hours looking into DHCP issues as I couldn’t accept the “duplicate” answer either. All to no result from my router’s (pfSense) extensive logging and a bit of network sniffing.

Reserved the addresses anyway.

Sonos system went from unusable to stable.

Just got several new Sonos, assigned them addresses using the MAC addresses on the shipping box. All went in with no issues, versus last time I tried without assigning addresses first that added hours and frustration to simply adding two surrounds.

Add them, worry about why it works later, if at all.

I spent 2.5 hours with Sonos support. They finally gave up to no avail. 
 

I have reserved the IPs. No improvement. 
 

I have turned off the sky wifi and tried to just use the ASUS wifi. Then sky stopped working on the mini boxes and eventually the main box. 
 

I have since split the sky channel to 2ghz and 5ghz and connected the Sonos to the sky 2ghz network and left the ASUS network running. Still isn’t stable. 
 

The Sonos engineer thinks it’s something to do with the sky q boxes and their mesh network. But I bought netspot and seems very little over lap with channels. I am unsure how to find if any network device is ‘noisy’. Doesn’t seem to be an issue with the 5ghz band width. 
 

I’m at the point of giving up. I am a completer finisher and once I start I struggle to stop. But I feel I have now spent at least 10 hours on this and if I didn’t have £3k worth of speakers I would have replaced with a bunch of Apple stuff that just works from box. 
 

Apologies if sometimes I used wrong terminology. I have been honest that I know a little but clearly not enough to solve. 

Based on the evidence that is emerging I think that the statement that is frequently made about the issue being our local networks is actually an incomplete statement and the truth is that the issue is the way that Sonos implement their “sub network” within our local network. 

When looked at in this way the duplicate IP address theory seems more plausible but that does leave the important question:

Why does this impact some users but not others? 

In the analysis that I did earlier today, and published here, 6 IP addresses being used by Sonos were not in the active IP addresses logged by the router so could be considered “invisible” or “unused” and therefore available for allocation by the router.

If the router is reusing IP addresses, it believes are not in use, that Sonos thinks are still allocated to a speaker that would obviously create the duplicate scenario that would cause an issue when Sonos used that address to connect to the speaker.

As a theory it makes some sense but at this stage it is just a theory. 

Using fixed IP addresses would of course prevent this scenario.

This is a perfect example. All speakers connected to directly to the sky 2ghz network. (There is an ASUS mesh network running under a different SSID. You can see from the top two speakers (bedroom and dining room) that I can’t control the volume. This is just one of a number of random glitches that happens constantly. 
 

​@Gaham it is a well known fact that most consumer routers’ allocation tables do not persist over a reboot or a power failure, leaving any IP addresses in use before the reboot/power failure effectively orphaned.  When other devices request a new IP, the router hands out the currently “unassigned” addresses, regardless if they were in use before.  

It has been a recommendation to reserve addresses for Sonos equipment since as long as I’ve been here, and I can count on one hand the number of times this advice didn’t work when the posters put the effort into following it.  On the other hand, I can’t count the number of times it was argued with, and those posters either gave up, or are still complaining to this day. 

I have no issues related to IP Address either reserved or on DHCP.  I reserve IP Addresses only to find them reverted back to DHCP.  I guess Xfinity will not allow you to permanently keep those Addresses reserved.  The only thing on the network that goes missing occasionally is my Bryston BDP-2 which for some reason cannot be found using the device name so I have to use its IP Address.  So that’s my canary in the cave mine that lets me know Xfinity screwed up my reserved address again. 
 

May look into increasing the IP Address lease time or chew out Xfinity.

​@Canaryyella you have clearly been very thorough so I’m not sure if there is an option to suggest that you could try.

What I can tell you is that I use a Sky router with Sky Q and two of the satellite boxes and Sonos is attached to the 5gHz I do not get the connection problems that you describe just poor responses and system not found messages that recover when I restart the App.

I do not have fixed IP addresses (yet).

Whatever you decide to do next I wish you all the best.

Using fixed IP addresses would of course prevent this scenario.

Agreed. I treat most devices like I would a server and have a fixed IP for them. The only devices I allow to get a new IP every time are my phones, tablets and laptops. 

Thanks ​@Gaham. 
 

When you say satellite boxes do you mean the mini boxes? (Just checking they are not the boosters). 
 

How did you get the Sonos to connect to the 5ghz? (I genuinely think that it’s the 2ghz network causing the issue). The Sonos engineer said that Sonos only uses 2ghz and even instructed me to split the signal. 
 

honestly. Thank you for all your help. I don’t use forums and the helpfulness (or at least trying to help) has been amazing. So thank you. 

That is actually a simplistic explanation of what happens when a router is restarted and devices with IP addresses look to reconnect it is also not the point because most of the issues that are being discussed here are not actually happening after a router reboot but they are occurring during “normal” operation.

If you read my previous post, that I assumed prompted this post, I am not arguing against fixed IP addresses I’m just trying to understand why they are alleviating issues in a scenario where the router has not been rebooted. 45 years in IT have taught me not to implement a fix that you don’t need (or understand).

I do not and never have used fixed IP addresses for Sonos and before the app and firmware updates that started on 7th May my system was stable and reliable. I don’t think I am seeing the issues that fixed IP addresses are supposed to fix but, as has been documented by others, something has changed in the way that Sonos works and those changes are impacting users.

​@Canaryyella my bad they are on the 2gHz (I just checked) on my Router I don’t differentiate and let the device choose. 

Yes I mean the mini.

When we help others we help ourselves. Sonos clearly have some issues that it looks like they do not understand and therefore cannot fix. Of course they may already understand the issues and still not be able to fix them.

You provided some really useful insights today so I simply explored what you were saying about your system on mine to try and make sense of it all.

Once again sorry for the misinformation and lack of clarity on the 2gHz and the boxes being called sky mini.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate your help 

Seeing inside Sonos, even back when we had far more internal access, was not very productive when looking at addressing issues.

Looking at my router’s DHCP server (ISC DHCP Server) logs shows no irregular requests from Sonos, nor any odd addressing being sent to them.

Given we don’t even know what DHCP code Sonos is running, probably an older Linux version at some patch level. And with our very restricted internal access any realistic troubleshooting is going to have to be done by an external device like a packet-sniffer.

That will be a large commitment of time spent pouring over logs and multiple reboots, reconfiguration and Factory Resets of your Sonos gear to try to get it to expose the bad behavior.