I’ve been aware of Sonos as a premium wireless speaker solution for a long time, but the price always seemed excessive for what, on the face of it, offers little more than a simple Bluetooth speaker. But after Subsonic needed its database rebuilding for the third time and I was unable to play music for a dinner party, enough was enough. I was willing at last to pay the premium for something that was purported to work.

Background

My music collection is mostly comprised of purchased Audio CDs that I have ripped under Linux. Currently I have a Music folder on our MythTV system, and have installed Subsonic to share our music to our many tablets and phones, using the excellent Subsonic Android App. If I want to play from Subsonic to my music system then I have a Logitech Bluetooth Audio Receiver Adapter that receives the audio and plays it through my old-school Sony amplifier.

The main issues with this set-up is that the music only plays in the living room and not elsewhere in the house. We have bought an additional Creative D80 Bluetooth Wireless Speaker, but of course each can only play independent streams.

I also find Bluetooth a frustrating technology where you don’t have a simple 1:1 paradigm. In our case we have probably a dozen tablets and phones, each determined to pair with the Bluetooth receivers and then prevent other devices from connecting.

Choosing Sonos Speakers

The Sonos range comprises of the small Play:1 at £155, a medium-sized Play:3 at £229 and a larger Play:5 at £413. On the Goldilocks principle of the middle one being “just right”, I opted for two of the Play:3 at £229 each - one for the living room and one for the kitchen. The plan was to move those elsewhere at a later stage and hopefully upgrade the living room system to a pair of Play:5 speakers.

The important thing to understand is that neither the Play:1 nor the Play:3 speakers have a Line-In. This means that you can only play from on-line content. If you currently subscribe to one of the supported Sonos Services, then that is fine, but if you’re wanting to play content from a CD or other input source - then you can’t. The Play:5 does have a Line-In, as does the Sonos Connect at £264.

A word about the Sonos Connect. A simple way to imagine it is that it is basically a Play:5, but without the speaker. In other words it has the same Sonos interface with Line-In but no speaker. If you have an existing music system then this is potentially ideal and with hindsight I wish that what I had done was to purchase one Play:3 for the kitchen and one Sonos Connect for the living room. The opposing view is that a pair of Play:5 speakers complete obsoletes an existing music system - so why not do away with the legacy equipment.

Amazon Prime Music

One great disappointment was that, whilst Sonos supports Amazon Music, it does not support Amazon Prime Music. One of the main reasons we had bought Sonos was to play Amazon Prime Music, so this was a major problem. At the time of writing it is available in the US as a Beta service and has been for a few months. One can only hope that it will trickle across to the UK in due course.

Google Play Music

Hoping that the Amazon Prime issue would be resolved, we signed up to a 30 day free trial with Google Play Music. This worked extremely well, except for the recommended playlists which do not appear as a Sonos Queue. The main issue we found was that our children would choose a song and click “Play Next” and this would interrupt the playlist - very irritating if you were enjoying a particular song. We assumed that this was a feature of Sonos, but Spotify does not work like that (see below).

Spotify

We then subscribed to the 30 days free trial with Spotify. You only need the individual member subscription to work with Sonos, but the ongoing cost is the same as Google Play. The only advantage of Spotify is that the recommended playlists appear as a proper Sonos queue, enabling you to save it as a Sonos Playlist, or add a song into the queue.

Subsonic

One delight was that we were able to play our local music via Subsonic. This is a Beta service and I did have a small problem getting it working. Unfortunately I cannot remember the nature of the problem, other than an Internet search solved it.

Conclusions

Obviously we were disappointed at the lack of Amazon Prime Music. I was also a little disappointed at the abrupt handling of music changes - if you click “Play Now” the music stops instantly and the next track starts. I do feel that with a premium set-up like this that music transitions should be handled more smoothly.

We also have had issues with our children messing about with Sonos - as the interface is open to all. We have sufficient control of our children that this isn’t a significant problem, but knowing some families this could be a serious issue. I do feel there should be some security, to enable clients to be de-authorised, or limited only to a subset of features.

Will I continue to invest in Sonos? Undoubtedly yes, but I think the next purchase will be a Sonos Connect followed by a better set of audio speakers.

Mike sorted this out by setting up IP forwarding on his laptop, so that we had a wired network which used his wireless connection as a gateway. I knew this was technically possible, but I had not actually seen it done before.

So this morning I sought out suggestions from the Surrey LUG Mailing List, and the following was the end result.

Please note that this solution is as-yet untested by me and involves changing your existing iptables rules - albeit only until you reboot.

Assuming eth0 is your LAN port and wlan0 is your wireless WAN port, and that you have connected your client PC to your host PC with a crossover ethernet cable (or perhaps via a dedicated switch), then the following instructions should work:

On the Laptop

On the laptop, which is assumed to have a working wireless connection, and a wired connection to the Client PC:

Firstly, you will probably need to set some static IP details:

# ifdown eth0
# ifconfig eth0 192.168.10.1 netmask 255.255.255.0

Next we need to activate IP forwarding, and setup iptables to NAT:

# sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o wlan0 -j MASQUERADE

The following may be worth trying if the client gets Host Prohibited responses:\

# iptables -F FORWARD 
# iptables -A FORWARD -j ACCEPT 
# iptables -nvL

DNS and DHCP

If you plan to do this regularly, then you might consider using dnsmasq to provide a DNS nameserver and DHCP to your client PC. If you do this, then you should not complete the next section entitled “On the Client PC”, which should just pick up its details using DHCP. This method is particularly handy with a Debian net install.

# apt-get install dnsmasq 
# vim /etc/dnsmasq.conf interface=eth0 dhcp-range=192.168.10.10,192.168.10.19,4h 
# /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart

On the Client PC

Do not carry out this section, if you configured dnsmasq above.

On the client PC, which is assumed to have a wired connection to the laptop, all you need do is configure static IP networking and add a working nameserver to /etc/resolv.conf (normally populated via dhcp-client):\

$ sudo -i
# ifdown eth0
# ifconfig eth0 192.168.10.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 192.168.10.1
# echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf

Finishing up

When you’re finished, you should comment out the lines in /etc/dnsmasq.conf and reboot, and you should be back to normal again.

I am really looking forward to testing this set-up; so in the meantime if you get it working, please do let me know. Any suggestions for improvement - please do feel free to comment.

The Issue

Currently the only method of accessing LTSP from a wireless device (e.g. laptop) is by running the local operating system and installing NoMachine on the client. It would be extremely useful to boot laptops directly into LTSP.

The Options

The following two pages would seem to outline the possibilities:

• http://www.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/WirelessLtsp
  • http://www.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/WirelessLTSPClientsUsingAnEthernetBridge

I cannot help but conclude that, time being an important factor, the Ethernet Bridge option is the sensible course to take.

Proof of Concept

As it happened, I had an old Lucent Wireless Ethernet Converter, sadly only a 10-base-T model. I configured it with a static IP address, and attached it to my laptop’s network port. Rebooted my laptop and, joy of joys, it immediately PXE booted. Unfortunately it was painfully slow, so a better device is clearly required.

Possible Wireless Bridges

• ASUS WL330GE Wireless Access Point
• Linksys model number WET54G
• Belkin Wireless G Ethernet Adapter F5D7330uk
• Buffalo Wireless Ethernet Controller WLI-TX4-G54HP-1

After initially opting for the Belkin, I ended up opting for the Buffalo, largely off the back of some decent reviews.

Buffalo Wireless Ethernet Controller

My Buffalo Wireless Ethernet Controller WLI-TX4-G54HP-1 arrived today, so I eagerly installed it at home. As usual there is no configurator for Linux, so you have to use the web-admin page, this requires you to connect via a wired port configured for the same network 1.1.1.0/24. Once done it was very simple to configure - I gave it a static IP (not sure whether that was really required) and rebooted into Edubuntu.

Very straightforward, but the performance, whilst infinitely better than my old Lucent Ethernet Converter described in my Proof of Concept, was less than stunning. Launching Gcompris, struggled with the music, but once the music was switched off the moving images and sound seemed fine. Gnome seems a little sluggish at times, but probably quicker than my ageing Dell Inspiron 8200 is normally!

I guess I would describe performance of Edubuntu via Wireless as satisfactory - but if you require sound/video I think you’ll struggle. That said it is a useful additional method of accessing LTSP and will no doubt have its place at work, e.g. adhoc workstations.

References

• http://www.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/WirelessLtsp
  • http://www.ltsp.org/twiki/bin/view/Ltsp/WirelessLTSPClientsUsingAnEthernetBridge
• http://www.lug-kr.de/wiki/ThinClientLokalBooten
  • http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lug-kr.de%2Fwiki%2FThinClientLokalBooten&sl=de&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

My Buffalo Wireless Ethernet Controller WLI-TX4-G54HP-1 arrived today, so I eagerly installed it at home. As usual there is no configurator for Linux, so you have to use the web-admin page, this requires you to connect via a wired port configured for the same network 1.1.1.0/24. Once done it was very simple to configure - I gave it a static IP (not sure whether that was really required) and rebooted into Edubuntu.

Very straightforward, but the performance, whilst infinitely better than my old Lucent Ethernet Converter, was less than stunning. Launching Gcompris, struggled with the music, but once the music was switched off the moving images and sound seemed fine. Gnome seems a little sluggish at times, but probably quicker than my ageing Dell Inspiron 8200 is normally!

I guess I would describe performance of Edubuntu via Wireless as satisfactory - but if you require sound/video I think you’ll struggle. That said it is a useful additional method of accessing LTSP and will no doubt have its place at work, e.g. ad-hoc workstations.