Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Media player discussion (moved from 861v6 thread)

Agree with the switch stuff for Sonos. I had massive problems with a Netgear managed switch which I bought specifically because it had STP support, and it took down my network. I replaced it with a no-name Taiwanese cheapy, works perfectly.

The Spanning Tree protocol is for Loop avoidance. If there is a loop a broadcast could cause a storm easily.
As long as you do no wire up parallel cables between switches or connect the last one in a row to a first one etc. there should not be problems with spanning tree.
I would not mix up brands to avoid spanning tree issues from the different brands.

I use(d) linksys managed switches and broadcast storms never happened.

Also end devices should not participate in stp.

Unfortunately with some devices having both wired and wireless interfaces, network loops are something that must be designed to be accomodared.

Take for example the Sonos music system. It is inherrinently a wireless based system where a mesh network is created between all Sonos components. However, officially, it must be connected to the Internet via a cat 5 connection. The problem of multiple routes and loops occur the moment you hard wire in another Sonos component, not an unreasonable requirement if you want the reliability of a wired network connection. This instantly creates a dual path, one via the wireless bridge over the mesh network and the other via the wired network, leading to unavoidable broadcast storms unless the network is designed to handle this, ie via a switch that supports stp which can effectively manage multiple link routing to avoid the loop.

I've had good luck with the cheap DLink DGS-2205 "Green" Gb switches in my Sonos network. My network looks like this, with 4 more wireless Sonos units too:

The cheaper HP pro-switches don't like Sonos either, but the $30 DLink's work great

They are the same switches that I'm using (Dlink Green). Have you managed to stream hi-def video through them successfully?
Thanks
Tom

Is this the case even if you disable the wireless interface in the device that you've hard wired? Or ... are you saying that a network is impeded if it runs both a wired and wireless system on the same LAN (without STP)?

Thanks
Tom

It depends on the device. With Sonos it's an issue due to it's mesh wifi network always being on and the Sonos system acting as a wireless bridge so you can extend a wired network with the Sonos zone players - a feature that I rely on, not ideally, for network access between my router and office but wish to do away with when I can be bothered to run that catx cable and replace my existing switches with ones that support stp.

For same reason, airport express can also suffer when configured in extend network mode and you accidentally get multiple wired and wireless routes.

I see you have squeezebox. Not sure if it is an issue with them. Certainly early versions did not have complex wifi capabilities such as bridged networks but think it may have been added in more recent versions as I recall some feature about connecting wired devices wirelessly through sb but this is not the same as a sonos mesh network where zone players talk to directly to each other via their own network and not via the wireless router.

I've not encountered issues with SB with this. Selecting wireless or ethernet on the initial setup IIRC.

Thanks Ian - I don't think it effects my squeezebox, although I do get drop out on one wireless reciver (screenless squeezebox) which is also the furthest one away from the transmitter, so probably unrelated. I just wanted to make sure that this is wasn't an inherit condition of all wired/wireless LANS - I can see why bridge mode would require both connectors being active.

Cheers
Tom

Yes, our DVRs are DirecTV HR22 and we use the beta network sharing to watch shows on one device that the other recorded. We have no problem with 1080i/720p H264 content - I can't remember a single glitch.

My Direct TV boxes are freezing up when I use this beta thing and it worked fine for weeks. I wonder what the problem is. I had to turn it off. I should say my boxes are modded with big hard drives (1tb I believe) Maybe its just too much data for them to process.

It appears that the new Kaleidescape Blu-Ray changer acts more as a 'vault' than as a disc changer.

So in short:
- yes, the BR disc needs to in the changer
- no, it is not accessed anymore after the initial import


Not too bad IMHO.