I listen to my music using a wired set of Sonos
One speakers. Last week I upgraded my wifi by installing a Netgear Orbi Wifi Mesh. After doing this my Sonos
system no longer worked properly. After much hunting I managed to find the
problem, and it was a simple fix. So I thought I’d share my story in case
others run into a similar problem.
I’ve been very happy with my Sonos system, it delivers music around the
house, with only occasional problems. My setup is five Sonos One speakers,
arranged into three zones. I’ve set it up as a wired system, meaning that
one of the speakers is wired into the network with a cable. When Sonos is
set up like this, the speakers create their own wifi network, independent of
any other wifi network in the building. They use a custom protocol for this,
one that apparently better suits music streaming. It also doesn’t fight for
bandwidth with the main wifi. Almost all the music I play is bought, stored
on my house Ubuntu server, which uses samba to make it available to the Sonos.
My wifi was a 2012 vintage apple airport express. It too has worked
well, but recent changes led to a couple of areas of difficult reception.
Looking around the internet, I found good reviews for the Netgear Orbi
system, so I picked one up.
The initial installation went fine. I powered down the airport express,
and installed the Orbi using the same network name and password. Various
devices in the house communicated fine with the new network. Trouble reared
its head when I went downstairs for a whiskey and tried to put on some music.
The Sonos players could not find my music on the server any more.
I went back upstairs to my office and played around with the system,
using the primary troubleshooting method of any electrical systems
specialist – switching everything off and on. This fixed the problem, the
Sonos app on my laptop (which is really a desktop since its wired into the
network and a big screen) showed me the whole system, my music, and gladly
played things. Back down to my comfy chair and Ledaig.
But now I ran into another problem to keep me away from the wee dram. The
Sonos app on my iPhone couldn’t see any of my Sonos speakers. Instead I got
a message saying it couldn’t find my system “let’s fix it”. Their fixing
suggestions resulted in much more power cycling and pressing of
buttons – but nothing worked. I could control and play music normally from
my desktop, but my other devices were blind. I don’t want to have to go
upstairs whenever I want to control my music, and this is not tenable for my
wife. I hypothesized that there was some cache on the ios apps that holding
onto the old wifi somehow, maybe being too clever and thus confused by a
different device even though the network name was the same. But by now it
was late at night and I was stuck in that bind where I can’t sleep for
thinking about the problem, but my tired brain was more likely to make
mistakes than progress.
When I returned to the problem the following day, I didn’t have any new
ideas, but I tried some things to gather more information. One of these led
to the breakthrough. Following the “it’s a cache” hypothesis I tried to
install the Sonos controller software on a fresh device, this time an old laptop. It failed
to see the speakers, thus pouring cold water on the shaky cache idea. But while I
was doing this I looked at the network connection and saw the laptop had an
IP address of 10.0.0.8. This was significant, IP addresses on my home
network are given by my router that runs DHCP, which hands out IP
addresses in the 192.168.1 range. I did a bit of pinging and found this laptop
could ping my server and my speakers, but my server couldn’t ping the laptop.
The situation was settled by googling “Orbi dhcp”. I discovered that
typically the Orbi is configured in router mode, where the orbi runs its own
DHCP server . Since I already have a router I
needed to change the orbi over to access point mode. The procedure for doing
so was finicky: involving an extra network cable, logging into the orbi as
admin, and the always scary “advanced settings” tab. But I found that
Netgear had some clear
instructions. Once my Orbi restarted in access point mode, everything
worked.
