Networking question

[millstParticipant]

I’ve got a question about gigace.
We do a lot of productions where we do sound, lighting and video and we have just started using NDI for video (it’s like Dante for video).

We want to go to a single cable snake solution and run all the traffic over a single fibre from FOH to stage.

We have a 10G fibre going between two microtik layer 2 switches which have 10Gbit sfp ports and then a bunch of 1G Ethernet.

We have split up the Ethernet on different vlans so that the traffic is not on the same network.

My question is about the protocol that goes between the rack and the surface.

Even when we connect the two via a dedicated vlan we get an error light and no connection.

Is there a trick that I’m missing?
Is there a bettter way of doing this?

Is the dSnake protocol layer 2 only and if so is there any way we can achieve this type of scenario?

[SteffenRParticipant]

https://support.allen-heath.com/Knowledgebase/Article/View/1152/335/gigaace-and-dx-networking-vlans-and-fibre-optics

[millstParticipant]

Ok thanks. Looks like it must just be later 3 settings on the vlans. I’ll have a play. Thanks for the link.

[JayParticipant]

Millst,

I spent some time playing with Gigaace via a switch, just to see what was involved.

Test platform:
Cisco SG-300, single switch
Only “A” GigaAce between DM64 and S5000, 1.61 FW

Observations:
– Not running jumbo packets
– All packets are L2 VLAN tagged for VLAN 1 <— This will require you change the default switch VLAN off of 1
– Disabled CDP, Spanning tree, BPDU guard, etc. Still received clock glitches
– Ran the VLAN without an IP address to prevent switch-originated ARP requests or other traffic.

Final results (realizing this was just 1 switch with no other traffic):
– Audio was passing & full surface control
– About every 15 minutes there was a “hiccup” that caused the S5000 to show a loss of sync. Clear. Shows back up.
– Bandwidth was too high to do a monitor port to see what other traffic was on the VLAN.

Overall, the most difficult part was the fact they were treating it as a trunk with everything already VLAN 1 tagged. If they would allow that to be set, tunneling of a high capacity network might be feasible.

Jay

[Nicola A&HKeymaster]

Hi Jay and others,

We are planning to remove the hardcoded VLAN 1 tag in a future firmware release. This should allow gigaACE to travel through tagged VLANs and trunks more easily.

[JayParticipant]

Nicola,

Good to hear. Can I suggest that you allow the option of setting the VLAN tag instead of “removing” it, if I read that correctly?

If you “remove” it, then the switch will have to insert/remove the tag on all the packets that traverse it on access ports. If you allow us to tag it correctly on both ends then the switch should be able to handle it as a trunked port correctly.

Also, is the dscp also being set (or made settable)?

Thanks,

Jay

[ddff_lvParticipant]

I’ve heard also Mikrotik is aware of this and they said some of further FW upgrades could fix that

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