TTS/S5 pairing

[dcorsus]

Steve,

thanks for all the logs, do turn the firewall back on asap on your router.

You wrote that you don't use network switches but unless I misunderstand your network drawing, how do you go from the Bathroom player to two more players, being living room and Kitchen? Or for example, the Kitchen connects to Summer house a printer and the TV, are you perhaps using hubs rather than switches?

I'm going to assume that you daisy chained some and use hub (or a switch). Is it correct that you have a cable from the router to your bathroom. At the Bathroom player you either use the player's second port and have a hub that connects further out to the living room and Kitchen or is the hub before the player and fans out to BR, LR, Kitchen? I'm interested to know whether you use the second port on players or have hubs sitting in front of a player.

I assume in your drawings, everything in back is a wire connection, are the red lines, wireless?

One of things to monitor is when pings start failing, do they indicate some part of your network and then by looking at your network diagram, can you pinpoint the weak link in it.

Dirk

[Stevieboy]

Hi Dirk

Firewall now back on

Dirk, just to clarify the red lines on the drawing are not wireless, its just that they crossed over other lines so didn't want to confuse the issue,sorry

All units are hardwired, I have use the Cat5 sockets on the back of the players (4 on ZP100) as was lead to believe that they served as networks switches. I do have a 4 way switch but took it out ages ago thinking it was surplus to requirements

Yes, the router connects directly to the bathroom player, but after that no hub, just cat5 cables in back of players. I have tried to daisy chain players where possible. Perhaps thats the problem. I was aware when connecting not to create a network loop but was just concerned about conecting a player "twice" to the network.

Today I sat and watched the network connections and log for ages but failed pings (typical)

I am on a days annual leave tomorrow so if you have any suggestions about a rewire, I have a 4 way switch at hand. I can install this somewhere if you think that may improve my network configuration.

I may be getting to the stage of formatting computer and starting from scratch. The only thing that concerns me is that I have copied the complete HS folder to a separate drive but dont want to copy back any gremlins that may be in the folder. Perhaps a fresh download from HS website may be a better options. Is there just a single file that can be kept back with all your events on ?

I await your reply, Loft ladder at the ready incase network switch required

Cheers

[dcorsus]

Steve,

I wasn't aware that the ZP100 had 4 ports but now I do. I did some google but can't find anything on whether these ports are SW controlled or HW controlled. If the former, the more traffic through them the more the CPU will be loaded which could explain failing pings or dropped UPnP.

So let's try to get some info from all the players ....

If you open a browser and you type in

http://xx.xx.xx.xx:1400/status

You get a list of command you can run on the players. You need of course substitute the xx.xx.xx.xx with the IP address of each individual player and is typically something like 192.168.1.1xx

The ones I'd be interested in is:
http://xx.xx.xx.xx:1400/status/enetports
and check whether all ports are in 100FD mode. If you spot ports that are in 10FD or 100HD or 10HD, that might be the bottleneck of the network and could indicate a cable/connector problem.

Next one would be
http://xx.xx.xx.xx:1400/status/ifconfig

as this shows the counters of the ethernet ports. Do keep each log, typically error counters are reset when read, not sure how Sonos implemented it.

http://xx.xx.xx.xx:1400/status/dmesg
This one will display some debug messages, might indicate something on network changes or events it has seen.

http://xx.xx.xx.xx:1400/status/uptime
Use this to see when the player was booted last time. If you find a player (like Kitchen or Bathroom) with a shorter uptime, that may indicate that this player on occasion boots and could be the source to the network problem.

Good luck. If all else fails, you could buy a cheap network switch and place it in front of the Bathroom player, see how that goes.

Suggest you write down the IP addresses off each device on your network diagram and add which Ethernet port is connected to what so when you look at all these ports and you see error counts <> 0, that would be the segment to focus on.

Dirk

[Stevieboy]

Hi Dirk

I have spent the day trying your suggestions.

All players ports are set to 100FD, I thought I had cracked it when I looked at the Dmesq for the summer house, mentioned a line about amp thermal warming. Upon reading this, I have re located ALL players just in case this may be happening with some of the others ??

The summer house player was sitting in the sun (when we have some over here in the UK of course ) so was concerned that thermal shutdown may be occurring. After doing this and playing some annoucements it still dropped out. I did however watch the resource monitor for activity. I shutdown Blue Iris and deleted dropbox and also shutdown Teamveiwer.

Uptime for the players is only a couple of days, the summer house was a few hours but would this effect the network as it's at the end of the daisy chain ???

I noticed that APSdaemon.exe was running, I also stopped this (something to do with Applepush or something) but still have the same issue.

I did noticed that the svchost exe seemed to be running when dropouts occur (google showded that It was something to do with Microsoft sysyem) Could this be consuming bandwith. Although saying that the network monitor seemed to tick along at about 8%.

I took your advice and wrote down connections and IP adresses, and also noted where the port numbers terminated. Not sure where you mean to check for errors (if I was looking in the right place then I could see no errors, all were sent and none were dropped!

I have e mailed you some screenshots, I'm afraid it all looks like someone who knows what they are looking for to read I hope there may be some useful info there?

As for the network switch, I have one at hand. Whe you say put it in front of the Bathroom player do you mean just utilise all connections on the switch rather than player (to ease the flow of traffic through the bathroom player)

Hope this info helps

Cheers

[dcorsus]

Uptime for the players is only a couple of days, the summer house was a few hours but would this effect the network as it's at the end of the daisy chain ???

Only a few days huh. Do you have power outages or do you power down the players? If not then I would keep on eye on this. Contrary to popular believes, even Sonos players do crash, it is sometime hard to notice. As to your question about the end of the chain, It shouldn't influence it but I have no idea how "communication intensive" a player coming on line is with its neighbors. From the network diagram, you should not have issues with STP as there are no wired dual connections, but you can never know what the interaction is between the wired and the wireless network from the Sonos players. I assume your router doubles as a wireless access point? I have seen in my house that booting a player causes another player to be bumped off the network and immediately come back, again my suspicion is that Sonos build its own wireless/wired view of the network and a bouncing player affects that. If the summerhouse has only a few hours of up-time, is that because you power cycled it, or is there something wrong with that player.

I took your advice and wrote down connections and IP adresses, and also noted where the port numbers terminated. Not sure where you mean to check for errors (if I was looking in the right place then I could see no errors, all were sent and none were dropped!

Use this in conjunction with the output of this http://xx.xx.xx.xx:1400/status/ifconfig command. If you see errors on any of the interfaces than you can use the diagram to see where that was and which (downstream) devices it may affect. Second purpose is the error log for missed pings. If you assume that your network is a tree starting from the router, which pings are failing could show you on which "branch" of that tree you may have problems.

I have e mailed you some screenshots, I'm afraid it all looks like someone who knows what they are looking for to read I hope there may be some useful info there?

Will look at that later.

As for the network switch, I have one at hand. Whe you say put it in front of the Bathroom player do you mean just utilise all connections on the switch rather than player (to ease the flow of traffic through the bathroom player)

Yes that is correct, you would use the switch instead of the build in switch.

I would keep an eye open on the CPU idle/load, if it goes into periods of being very busy, it could be your virus scanner doing a scan, some other background tasks that some apps are doing that you are not aware off. So far has the ping failures, appearing in the log, be always during day time or more importantly, when people are in the house? If so, start thinking about what you or the family may have been doing when the failing pings show up.

Dirk