Vodafone Home Broadband / Vodafone Connect

[dynamick]

Hi there. Firstly the speeds and setup on my broadband have been great, so has most of the customer support I have had with initial gremlins on setup

I do have two big headaches though. I have a zyxcel nsa325 network drive which I store music, photos, movies etc on and On my old plusnet modem I just plugged it in the ethernet port and my Hitachi tv saw it. Now although the drive is visible through my PC and is visible wordlessly on the home network, the drive is not seen by my TV *unless the drive is plugged directly into the the ethernet port on the TV. So what setting am missing, there is no help or suggestions on the net, with it being a new modem there is no firmware 6 for it either.

Secondly, when I signed up for vodafone home broadband I was told that I would get 10 email addresses too, I have no idea where they are or indeed the pop/imap.plus.net settings for the addresses or the settings so I can send emails on my current email address.

Hope someone can help and thanks in advance

Mick

[dglasbrook]

Thanks - losing internet is only a recent issue, so I hope it's "just" a hw fault .. though I'm suspicious that it's stable until we use Sonos.

I'll try Vf support and see what they can do about it ..

[PeteB01]

Just a heads up on the Sonos wireless connection (which you may already know).  Only one speaker needs to be in range of the wireless router and the others just need to be in range of another one as they automatically "mesh" and will forward  the traffic on to the router.  You may not be able  to do it in your environment if all the speakers are a long way from the router  but for it to work, each speaker just needs to be within wireless range of at least one other speaker and then one of them needs to be in range of the router,

PS. My Sonos did also lose Internet connection as well as losing connection to the controllers, although all non Sonos  devices maintained Internet, it was very strange....

Cheers Pete

[dglasbrook]

@PeteB01 Thanks, but meshing isn't possbile for me to all Sonos units.

You say you did lose connection - is your Sonos all working correctly now? If so, was that after connecting another switch downstream of the Vf router?

[MrWhite]

@dglasbrook

It's worth looking at your sonos set up.  If you have at least one sonos component wired to the router, then you're using SonosNet (aka Boost) set up.  That is, the sonos components create a wireless mesh network of their own.  They don't use the VF router to communicate with each other.  However, your controllers do connect via the VF router, so need to be in range of it.  You mentioned that some are also connected via a managed switch.  This can cause network storms, so you'll need to ensure that STP is enabled on the router.

[dglasbrook]

@MrWhite thanks. I'm not at home at the moment, so may have some of this wrong, but I think I'm using all wired connections and no wireless for the Sonos units - they all have SonosNet disabled.

Some of the wired connections are into a Netgear GS108 that then connects to one of the Vf router LAN ports, but one Sonos unit is connected directly into a LAN port in the Vf router. 

When I first came across the problem and worked with Sonos support, I thought it might be an issue with STP and the Netgear switch, but it was only the early GS108 models that had that problem and are on the Sonos list of unsupported kit.

I've not come across any STP configuration settings on the Vf router - is this a feature of the new firmware?

[MrWhite]

STP is not needed on the main router and is not a feature on the VF router.  As the Netgear switch is unmanaged, then STP shouldn't be an issue either.

Is the VF router your only wireless device?

[crowster80]

This is not issolated incident only for you.  There was a software release and now my Router goes down at least 3 times a day.  Sometimes soft reset brings it back and sometimes only hard reset.  Luckily I have 8 more days and will be moving to another provider as this has become a joke

[dglasbrook]

@MrWhite no I have two APs that I use for wireless access - I needed one of them for coverage, which is when I discovered the bug with the router firmware (Sonos controller won't connect after moving from external AP wifi to Vf router wifi), so I put the other one in as a workaround.

[PeteB01]

@dglasbrook, The original problem I had was that my Sonos kept losing internet  (along with my NAS and wired PC not being able to talk to my wireless devices, although at the  time I hadn’t linked the two issues).  Then the controllers started dropping off as well and that was when it got unusable, so working with Sonos support we went though a lot and eventually changed Sonos  to wireless, from originally having one speaker wired and the rest meshed,  and that definitely  fixed the internet dropping and controller issue. However about a month later I got to the bottom of the my wired/wireless issue and discovered this Vodafone router issue which I believe was the root cause of all my problems all along.  After finding a router config that worked for me (no split SIDD or 5GhZ) I ran everything for 2 weeks (leaving Sonos wireless) and all was fine, so then I switched Sonos back to wired as I make use of SONOSNET  for providing Android and wired connection to the network in rooms where the main wifi is weak and you can't connect anything other than Sonos speakers to SONOSNET in full wireless mode. After putting it back the internet issue did not return and has been Ok for a couple of week now. So I believe that in my case it was a combination of a wired Sonos configuration and this root cause  VF router issue.  

One test I would  suggest you try (but it will depend on where your speaker are and how much you use them) is to temporarily turn off/disconnect  any speakers that you can’t get within meshing range, set Sonos to wireless, disconnected all wires connection from all speakers  and see how that works for a bit.  Clearly it won’t be a permanent fix but the outcome of the  test would be useful diagnostic information that Sonos support may be able to make use of.

Cheers Pete

[dglasbrook]

@PeteB01 thanks - I might try that, though I spoke to Vf support this afternoon who suggested router hard reset, so I'll probably try that first.