Rune vs. Roon?

Up until now I've used Rune as the audio player on my Raspberry Pis. It's a cut-down ArchLinux using mpd as the player and a PHP-based web interface and control server to manage and configure the mpd and o/s.

It works ok most of the time. However, and maybe this is not a problem specific to Rune, it is fairly flakey in respect of network connectedness. Yeah, on startup it usually connects and exposes itself as host.local, connects to the server for ripped data, is ready to receive DLNA/uPnP streams and reports to interested parties like Linn Kazoo and Lumin on iOS.

It's hard to work out what's going on, because the problem is network connectivity, so beaming in on SSH is not possible, and a restart appears to kill the log files - I need to research this a bit more. The log shows outage of the wired connection, which is weird... These entries show it's down for around 1 second! What's going on?

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom kernel: smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link down

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: carrier lost

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: deleting route to 192.168.1.0/24

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: deleting default route via 192.168.1.1

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom avahi-daemon[275]: Withdrawing address record for 192.168.1.3 on eth0.

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom avahi-daemon[275]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.3.

Feb 25 20:28:51 Frontroom avahi-daemon[275]: Interface eth0.IPv4 no longer relevant for mDNS.

Feb 25 20:28:52 Frontroom ifplugd[280]: Link beat lost.

Feb 25 20:28:52 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: carrier acquired

Feb 25 20:28:52 Frontroom kernel: smsc95xx 1-1.1:1.0 eth0: link up, 100Mbps, full-duplex, lpa 0x45E1

Feb 25 20:28:52 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: IAID eb:25:c4:1a

Feb 25 20:28:53 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: rebinding lease of 192.168.1.3

Feb 25 20:28:53 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: probing address 192.168.1.3/24

Feb 25 20:28:53 Frontroom ifplugd[280]: Link beat detected.

Feb 25 20:28:54 Frontroom ntpd[348]: Deleting interface #5 eth0, 192.168.1.3#123, interface stats: received=73, sent=75, dropped

Feb 25 20:28:54 Frontroom ntpd[348]: 178.79.160.57 local addr 192.168.1.3 -> <null>

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: leased 192.168.1.3 for 86400 seconds

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom avahi-daemon[275]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface eth0.IPv4 with address 192.168.1.3.

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom avahi-daemon[275]: New relevant interface eth0.IPv4 for mDNS.

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom avahi-daemon[275]: Registering new address record for 192.168.1.3 on eth0.IPv4.

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: adding route to 192.168.1.0/24

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: adding default route via 192.168.1.1

Feb 25 20:28:57 Frontroom dhcpcd[677]: eth0: removing route to 192.168.1.0/24

Feb 25 20:28:59 Frontroom ntpd[348]: Listen normally on 6 eth0 192.168.1.3:123

Feb 25 20:28:59 Frontroom ntpd[348]: 178.79.160.57 local addr 192.168.1.12 -> 192.168.1.3

Feb 25 20:28:59 Frontroom ntpd[348]: new interface(s) found: waking up resolver

Anyway, I've been investigating Roon, which I first encountered at Keith's house when I heard the Kii Audio Threes. He's running a MacMini as the Roon Core, the Rune Control on an iPad and using the Mac Mini as a Roon Output. it all seems very well thought through, and pretty robust. The one drawback is that it costs money, continuing money, at $120/year or $500 lifetime! It does have a fantastic interface, some amazing metadata capabilities and it also interfaces utterly seamlessly with Tidal. I'd have to provide a sensibly powerful box for the Core, I suspect an RPi isn't going to cut it, in fact, the Roon doco explicitly says it won't. 

But all this is moot if my hub is letting me down - how do I debug the network interface??