Wireless Water Cooler

Thought this may be helpful to anyone out there trying to use Sonos wireless speakers with AirGroup enabled on their Aruba wireless networks, as I hadn't seen any other posts regarding the use of these devices.

During a recent wireless proof of concept, it was asked whether the Sonos wireless speakers that an organization had would work on the Aruba wireless infrastructure with AirGroup enabled, and without allowing every service being advertised on the network.  After checking through the blocked AirGroup services multiple times (show airgroup blocked-service-id dlna), and testing and re-testing, we were able to determine the services required by the Sonos system.  We added the following service IDs to the DLNA Media airgroup service in order to make this system work as desired:

airgroupservice "DLNA Media"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:GroupRenderingControl:1"
  id "urn:schemas-sonos-com:service:Queue:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:AVTransport:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:RenderingControl:1"
  id "urn:schemas-tencent-com:service:QPlay:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:GroupManagement:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:ZoneGroupTopology:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:DeviceProperties:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:MusicServices:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:AlarmClock:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:device:ZonePlayer:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:SystemProperties:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:ContentDirectory:1"
  id "urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:ConnectionManager:1"

Of course, you could add these under your own airgroup service as "Sonos Services" or whatever you may want to call it in order to differentiate this traffic from other DLNA traffic.

One other thing we noticed was that the ArubaOS 6.4 release notes indicate that "Wireless Clients such as iPad and iPhone running the Sonos Controller application cannot discover Sonos music system with the AirGroup is enabled."  We chose to test this, and found that it actually does work on ArubaOS 6.4.2.2 using multiple Sonos PLAY:1 speakers.  We were able to successfully test playing to individual speakers as well as multiple speakers simultaneously using a Windows 8 client, a Mac OS X client running OS X 10.8+, an iPhone running iOS 8.x, and an iPad Mini running iOS 8.x.

Hope this helps someone else out there trying to use the Sonos speakers with AirGroup!

I am confirming that this works, thank you for this. I have multiple sonos systems in a network with 400 clients and all Apple products including iPhones, iPads, Macbooks were unable to discover the sonos. After enabling DLNA Media and adding the above urn's, All devices are now discoverable again for Macs and iPhones. I am not using the airgroup to do inter-vlan communication, but this was simply necessary to get it working within it's same VLAN.

One small detail that I noticed was I was unable to create a new service with the above mentioned urn's. Everytime I would try to enable/apply the service all urn's contained would delete themselves and only one would remain. I had to add the URN's to the existing DLNA Media service id.

I have Aruba OS 6.4.2.5.

Hello. I have the same problem, but Unfortunately I cant add any new service id to the existing DLNA Media. Once I add them and I save, they completely disappare.

I'm on Aruba Istant v 6.4.2.0-4.1.1.0_46028

Any idea how I can make Sonos work?

Have you tried creating a new group and tried adding the URNs that way?

hello.

Yes I created a new group and I could add all the services.

But again, after I save and come back all the services are disappared.

While the new button is obscured and non clickable on the pre-existing DLNA media.

did you ever figure this out.  I also cannot add new service id's from the web interface or cli.

paulfoley,

What version of code are you running?

Are you on the master controller?

I'm on version 6.4.2.0-4.1.1.0_45444

Hi all,

currently I am working with 2x Play1 and have been able to get things working once. After a few days the Plays were not reachable, did factory resets (4 or 5 times) and ended up with two seperate Plays in one network, not being able to make stereo pair. I reset both and used cisco 541, working for the moment.

i recognized that the IAP105 got unreachable during some configs and needed a reboot.

used IOS, Android, Windows8 and OSX to do configs.

Version:
6.4.2.6-4.1.1.7_50209

iPad on Aruba reaches Sonos on Cisco in the same network. iPad on Aruba and Sonos on Aruba does not work. iPad on Aruba and Sonos on utp works.

Hi vision4it,

I haven't tested Sonos functionality with Instant APs very much, but am aware that broadcast filtering can cause issues with it's ability to function properly.  Within the WLAN settings for the given network, under the WLAN settings screen, if you click on show advanced options, what is the status of the broadcast filtering option?  Also, to confirm, are all devices (iPad/other client devices, and Sonos speakers) on the same VLAN?  What is the status of AirGroup (enabled/disabled, if enabled, is it enabled for all services)?

If there isn't any need in this particular environment for cross-VLAN mDNS/DLNA functionality, I might suggest turning AirGroup off, setting broadcast filtering to none, and testing that out.  Even if there is a need for cross-VLAN AirGroup traffic, I might suggest trying these settings anyway, if possible, just to test the Sonos system on a very basic setup that should naturally allow the mDNS/DLNA traffic within the same VLAN.

Good luck!

JJ

Use the command below to see if some service-IDs are being blocked. Devices that do group-based association can sometimes use a custom service-ID.

 show airgroup blocked-service-id
 show airgroup blocked-queries

If you have a SONOS PLAYBAR, be sure to add 'urn:schemas-upnp-org:service:HTControl:1' to the list of services.

I'm running IAP 325's and had to disable "Broadcast filtering" in order to make it work on the Network where my Sonos controlers are connected on. Also created the AirGroup "Sonos" on the network with the services earlier in this post.

Thanks guys!!!!

We just had the challenge to add a SONOS speaker to our corporate infrastructure on the guest network for one of our customers lounge. We did created a new AirGroup service for it with the information provided here but it didn't worked.

While doing troubleshooting, my colleague found out via CLI "show airgroup blocked-service-id" that there was a few hit on the following: "urn:smartspeaker-audio:service:SpeakerGroup:1"

We added it to the Sonos service we created that fix the issue. We can now detect and configure the Sonos PLAY:3 speaker.

We though maybe the optimization settings in the VAP were giving us problem but no, after adding this urn, we re-enabled the optimization settings on our test SSID (DMO, Drop Broadcast and Unknown Multicast, Convert Broadcast ARP to Unicast) and it's still working fine.

FYI, after being able to connect SONOS via Wi-Fi with the previous service ID added to AirGroup, we faced a new issue. The streaming was frequently being dropped and if we force a disconnect from the controller (aaa user delete mac xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx), the speaker never reconnect unless someone power cycle it.

For the streaming issue, we though first it was related to client match settings which we disabled for testing. The problem was still hapenning. We tweak ARM to lower the max tx power of the AP to force the speaker to connect to the closest AP but this never worked even though our lower rate start at 12MB.

I placed a call to SONOS technical support and I learned that all their speaker does not support roaming, AP channel or Tx power change... So this explain why the streaming was stopping each time the speaker was roaming or that ARM was forcing a power or channel change. Since we have a lot of interferences we don't control (microwave oven, neighbor's Wi-Fi, etc), it's normal that our infrastructure react to this. The tech even told me their newer model PLAY 5 with dual band adapter have the same firmware functionality as the other model using 802.11g... So we are stock unless we do static channel and power but even there this will not prevent roaming behaviour but this will have more drawback to the remaining of the building.

We are now planning to have the speaker wired (patched) to the closest Access Point (AP-135) 2nd Ethernet port so we can do an AP-specific or AP-group wired profile to tunnel traffic back to local controller (Data-Center at different site) with the proper VLAN and assign the proper user Role as when it was on the Wi-Fi.

Can anyone confirm if the Sonos and Client need to be on the same VLAN? Even with AirGroup?

I can confirm that the Sonos speaker does not need to be on the same VLAN (as I assumed because of AirGroup), but it is only working for me so far on Wireless; most likely because Sonos uses Spanning Tree for a wired connection.