Unable to get Sonos speakers to work together over WLC 2504

[Bertro]

Hi, I'm trying to set up a Sonos Beam, two Play:1s and a Sub as a 5.1 home theatre setup. I have a Cisco WLC 2504 connected to a Cisco Catalyst Switch 2960C, connected to four Access Points. I have the following settings:

- Broadcast Forwarding: Enabled

- AP Multicast: Multicast with 239.255.255.250 Multicast Group Address

- Global Multicast Mode: Enabled - IGMP Snooping: Enabled

- mDNS Global Snooping: Enabled

- mDNS Snooping Enabled with default-mdns-profile under WLANs, Advanced

- mDNS Snooping Enabled for all APs

I am able to connect to the Sonos Beam via the Sonos App and play music etc. I am able to set up the Play:1s in stereo with the Sub as a separate "room" in the Sonos app and play music over those. However, I am unable to set up the Play:1s as surrounds for the Beam, or the Sub for the Beam. The setup always fails at the stage "Preparing the speakers in this room to work together".

I have tried connecting all speakers to the same AP, but that didn't help. I have tried connecting the Beam to the Cisco Switch via Ethernet, but then I wan't able to connect to the Beam at all. I have tried contacting Sonos support, but they weren't able to help much.

I suspect that some setting in the WLC is preventing the speakers to properly communicate with eachother over the WLAN.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[patoberli]

In the advanced SSID settings, do you maybe have enabled P2P Blocking Action?

[Bertro]

Hi patoberli,
Thanks for the reply. I don’t have access to the WLC right now, but I‘ll check for that setting as soon as I can and will keep you updated.

[Leo Laohoo]

What firmware is the WLC running on?

[edefauler]

Hello,

you have a new project for a long time :-)

I have sons with my 2504 running.

disable p2p blocking and bring every sonos speaker with ethernet in your network.

Later you can change this to wireless.

https://bourskov.dk/2017/05/cisco-wireless-and-sonos-players/

Norbert

[Bertro]

Hi,
Great to hear that you have it up and running! Thanks for the suggestions and the links, I‘ll check it out.

[Bertro]

Thanks for the response, Leo.
I don’t have access to the WLC right now, but I’ll check and get back to you as soon as I can.

[Martin H.]

I know it sounds weird but I observed the same issue on my setup. All Sonos speakers run as distinguished speakers w/o any issue but if you pair them as surround speakers with a beam, the Sonos App show them just as "+?". I turned on multicast routing on my Cat 3560 and the fixed it. So far I had no time to investigate deeper in this as usually if you have connected everything to one switch multicast should be forwarded. Follow this guideline here and you should get it working: https://bourskov.dk/2017/05/cisco-wireless-and-sonos-players/

Note: On your WLC you shouldn't use in Multicast 239.255.255.250 as this MC IP is used by Sonos. Use 239.1.1.1 or something else.

[Bertro]

Hi mhambaue,
Thanks for your response. I don’t have access to the WLC right now, but I’ll definitely check out the link you sent and MC IP as soon as I get a chance.

[gw00000011111]

Hi @Martin H. 

Did you get a chance to look into this further?

I have exactly the same issue however my setup is with a Sonos Arc.

With either IGMP snooping disabled or correctly configured stereo pairs and playback works perfectly. As soon as the Arc pairs in surround mode with the other speakers (Sub, SL x2) the Arc continues to play sound but all other speakers do not play music and show the "+?" as you describe above in the app.

I have a standard consumer/ISP router/WiFi, when the Sonos system connects to this unit it works just fine so I'm pretty sure this is a setting on the WLC/AP.

I have tried multiple different wireless settings, P2P enabled, direct client enabled, mDNS enabled, IGMP snooping enabled, broadcast forwarding enabled. I also have a 3650 with multicast routing enabled, snooping enabled.

I am running firmware 8.5.161.0, can anyone also test using this version? Anyone with this working what mode are your APs in Flex Connect/Local?

including using a layer 3 switch as described in the bourskov.dk blog post to no avail.

I have opened a case with Sonos, if anyone has any ideas i'm all ears?

[whatuusay1]

I am having the same issue, were you ever able to get this working? Sonos discovery works fine, and the ARC plays music just fine as well but will not pair with a sub (same symptom, the Arc (+?). The sub joins the wifi network fine before joining the ARC.

Using a WLC 3504 with C9120AXI-B AP's on 8.10.130.0. I have the typical features enabled (multicast, mdns, broadcast forwarding, igmp snooping). I saw some notes indicate this is because the ARC becomes a DHCP proxy for the connected/joined speakers (and the WLC blocks devices with more than 1 MAC address/ 1 IP address. I disabled this from the WLC cli 'config network ip-mac-binding disable' but no improvement. I suspect its the initial broadcast discovery that's not working, I'm curious if moving the AP's to flex connect would solve it or not..

[Jin21]

I had similar issues with the ARC, surrounds, and sub. Managed to somewhat solve the issues with the following setup on WLC:

• Broadcast Forwarding enabled
• AP Multicast to address 239.1.1.1
• Global Multicast mode enabled
• IGMP Snooping enabled
• mDNS Global snooping enabled
• mDNS Snooping profile set to default-mdns-profile under WLANs Advance
• mDNS Snooping enabled for each AP individually
• P2P blocking disabled (for airplay, etc)
• Passive Clients enabled (for non-cisco WGB)

My memory of the debugging I did is a little fuzzy but I found that without passive clients, the DHCP requests of paired surround and sub would be rejected and constantly loop after pairing to the ARC. It would seem that the ARC is trying to create a WGB that the surround and sub sit behind. However, a non-cisco WGB can only be established, with limitations, when passive clients are enabled. Once all setup, I was to pair the surrounds and sub using the sonos app without hardwiring any of them to the network. However, the NC-WGB setup is slow, so the sonos app would report that the pairing of surrounds or sub failed, but after about 5 minutes, the speakers would show up correctly paired.

This solution works most of the time but occasionally I find that one of the sonos speakers shows (+?). However, this generally tends to resolve itself after a while. Defiantly more debugging to do but im uncertain if some of these issues are due to limitations of the NC-WGB.

[Bertro]

Unfortunately I was not able to work around the issue and have sort of given up on it now. Using a Sonos Boost solved it for a while for me, but now I’m running into other issues with that too. Hope you guys have better luck.

All the best