Be careful with STP and Sonos
by Volker Weber
I just removed a very stupid switching mistake from my network. What happened was that I switched a large part of my traffic over SonosNet instead through the Gigabit switch. That basically affected all devices plugged into Sonos player, especially the Apple TV which is now performing much better.
The root cause of the problem was that the Netgear GS724TS had configured one port with a Sonos player as the designated root for all traffic going to SonosNet. All traffic went through this port. Sonos players also run the STP protocol to avoid loops in the mesh network. So here I was pumping all that traffic through one 100 MBit port, and from there over the wireless network to all players. Apple TV was connected to one of the players and had to stream video over the wireless SonosNet, although all players are also connected to Ethernet. Now that I disable STP in the Netgear switch, all Sonos players seem to attach to their Ethernet ports and traffic flows much more easily. Apple TV is also plugged into an Ethernet wall outlet.
Lesson learned: even if Sonos is very easy to setup, you can still make some very stupid mistakes.
