Sonos over a VPN
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Discussion

Output Flange

Original Poster:

17,011 posts

234 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
House A has your usual Sonos setup, a NAS and a Vigor router connected to broadband.

House B has a Sonos zone and a Vigor router.

The Vigor routers can create a site-to-site VPN, so is there any reason why the Sonos zone in house B wouldn't be able to use the NAS in house A for its source?

Thinking in the context of a holiday home, where taking all your music with you is a pain.

Mr Kitten

996 posts

250 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
Bandwidth and latency would probably be the main problem here.

If you've got some mega-fast fibre based broadband (e.g. 10mbps upload speed min) with latency of less than 10ms then you'll probably be alright... but for us mere mortals with normal broadband it'll probably not work.

Google Music?

Output Flange

Original Poster:

17,011 posts

234 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
It'd be on BT Infinity, so upload speed is around 7MB. Can't remember what the latency figure is, but 20ms rings a bell.

VEX

5,259 posts

269 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
Or just put the phone you like on your iphone / pad / touch and the latest software update allows you to stream it straight off the i-device.

Or subscribe to napster or spotify

V.

Output Flange

Original Poster:

17,011 posts

234 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
Ignoring the alternatives, would the VPN idea work?

boxst

3,806 posts

168 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
Yes. Although it can be slow at times. I stream iPlayer over VPN and it is fine.

(when I am working in America, VPN to my router to trick the BBC into thinking I'm in the UK)

bsdnazz

762 posts

276 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
It depends...

As far as I know, Sonos use their own protocol on the network and this may or may not be 'routable'.

A little Googling and it appears Sonos uses SSDP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Service_Discovery_Protocol) which is a multi-cast IP protcol.

So if you can VPN the two sites and route multi-cast packets between them it might work!


Output Flange

Original Poster:

17,011 posts

234 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
They use their proprietary protocol between zone players, but I assume they use standard IP packets to communicate with the NAS, no?

ukwill

9,942 posts

230 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all

If the vigor supports IP multicast routing (ie something like PIM) then you're in luck. If not, the mcast traffic won't get past the local subnet it's on.

cornet

1,471 posts

181 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
Quick google reveals that in theory you can run Sonos over VPN but it would need to be a layer 2 VPN which bridges the network (so the appear as one physical network).

OpenVPN can do this if you have a computer each end but most routers will not support it (they do layer 3 VPN only).

ukwill

9,942 posts

230 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
cornet said:
Quick google reveals that in theory you can run Sonos over VPN but it would need to be a layer 2 VPN which bridges the network (so the appear as one physical network).

OpenVPN can do this if you have a computer each end but most routers will not support it (they do layer 3 VPN only).
Apparently some of the vigor models support L2TP VPNs so this would be possible, depending on whether the OPs model supports it.

cornet

1,471 posts

181 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
ukwill said:
cornet said:
Quick google reveals that in theory you can run Sonos over VPN but it would need to be a layer 2 VPN which bridges the network (so the appear as one physical network).

OpenVPN can do this if you have a computer each end but most routers will not support it (they do layer 3 VPN only).
Apparently some of the vigor models support L2TP VPNs so this would be possible, depending on whether the OPs model supports it.
Ah didn't know that, not used any of the Vigor routers. Would need to check they allow bridging of both networks.

Note that expect all sorts of fun when setting this up both places become effectively one physical network so expect fun with things like DHCP servers etc... Unless you know what you're doing you're going to be tearing your hair out with all sorts of fun issues.


The way I would do this (assuming you aways have internet at your holiday home) is to do the following.

  • Get a low powered computer (Pi maybe) + external HDD to live in the holiday home which you can leave on all the time
  • Copy your music collection onto the external HDD and take it to the holiday home
  • Use http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html to keep them in sync

ukwill

9,942 posts

230 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
cornet said:
Ah didn't know that, not used any of the Vigor routers. Would need to check they allow bridging of both networks.

Note that expect all sorts of fun when setting this up both places become effectively one physical network so expect fun with things like DHCP servers etc... Unless you know what you're doing you're going to be tearing your hair out with all sorts of fun issues.


The way I would do this (assuming you aways have internet at your holiday home) is to do the following.

  • Get a low powered computer (Pi maybe) + external HDD to live in the holiday home which you can leave on all the time
  • Copy your music collection onto the external HDD and take it to the holiday home
  • Use http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html to keep them in sync
Or just use Spotify wink Cloud FTW!

cornet

1,471 posts

181 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
ukwill said:
Or just use Spotify wink Cloud FTW!

ukwill

9,942 posts

230 months

Monday 29th April 2013
quotequote all
cornet said:
I was at infosec last week - that is exactly what I was thinking whilst walking round. biggrin