Only Dante between Surface and Mixrack

[checkerex]

Hello,

it is possible to have only one connection between the surface and the mixrack over dante an not over gigaace?
I have only one cat6-cable to switches at both sides in a fixes installation.

thank you

C3500/CDM32

[RS]

To be honest, I don’t get your question…
Are the Dante devices connected to the dLive system? Maybe more info about your setup might help to understand what you want to achieve?

And this document might shed some light on this topic for you as well.

[peterwagner]

No, with only a surface and a mixrack you always need a GigaAce connection. All the processing takes place in the mixrack, the surface is only a remote for the mixrack.

[checkerex]

ok. thank you. here is a picture. maybe it is more clear.

[checkerex]

sorry

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[SanjOk]

The surface will not work…

[RS]

But even with your drawing it is not clear to me, what you want to achieve and why.
It looks like Mixrack and Surface would be the only 2 devices? So why use Dante in the first place?

[checkerex]

the problem is that there is no direct cable, but there are switches at both sides. in the past we have used an yamaha ls9 with a tio mixrack over dante.
ok, then i just need a seperate cable.

[Mfk0815]

GigaAce can be used with layer 2 switches. And afaik it can tunnel TCP/IP and therefore Dante. So try it before add an extra cable.

[RS]

And what else is connected to the switches?
Thought about setting up a VLAN just for GigaAce? It does not work with every switch, regarding the document I sent you. But it might be worth a try…

[checkerex]

i have tried to set up a vlan but with no success.
PCs and control devices are connected to the switches.

[Wolfgang]

Then you may have to use other switches.

[RS]

As the network ports in MixRack and Surface are actually switches themselves, they might be sufficient for what you want to achieve.
But as you still won’t give us the information needed this is hard to clarify…

[Brian]

Can you tie those two particular cat wires together and bypass the switch? If you can isolate that run you can probably use it for the Giga-ace connection without a lot of headache.

[PhilJ]

I know this convo is a little stale, but @checkerex, did you end up getting connected? Sounds like you’re in a bit of a tight spot if this is your only cable between your locations.

For the sake of clarification and hopefully helping others, I wanted to share my experience with this topic — information that is unfortunately a bit … opaque … to new users.

As the KB article linked above by @RS points out, we’re dealing with a PtP* Layer 2 link that’s not designed to have anything between the two nodes besides a cable. Ethernet switches will inherently interrupt the passage of packets from one endpoint to another due to any number of software and hardware design decisions.

They recommend unmanaged switches because they don’t implement even basic Layer 2 protocols such as LLDP; and these switches do not participate in STP, thus they do not send BPDUs. A&H’s point is that they have designed this link, and the network stack behind it, for little tolerance to stray frames of any kind that could cause the deterministic latency or time delta between frames to change. And for an interconnect that’s designed to be high-bandwidth, low-latency, and near-wire speed — with nothing in between — that’s not unusual.

Therefore, passing this link over a switched fabric requires a bit of work. The ports on each end should be access ports for the designated VLAN (not trunk ports — no voice VLAN either). They should have all optimization (flow control, CoS, QoS, EEE, etc.) disabled. And, we want to disable any Layer 2** management protocols, including STP, CDP/LLDP, etc.

Then there’s the matter of any ISLs this VLAN traverses if we have more than one switch in the path. This is a huge wildcard, but needless to say any CoS/QoS/queueing strategies will mess with this, not to mention the standard frame mangling that is normal in any Ethernet fabric. If you have no choice but to traverse more than one switch, consider using ISLs dedicated to this VLAN and this one alone.

Also, this link does *not* tunnel TCP/IP — it encapsulates Layer 2 from one end to the other and is Layer 2-adjacent with the network control ports on both the surface and the DSP. In other words, don’t take the gear on *both ends* and plug them into a larger network that also has its own links to both locations — just do *one side or the other*!! (Unless you like broadcast storms…)

Bottom line, don’t throw ACE/gigaACE through a switched fabric unless you’re really in a bind. But, chances are it will take a larger LOE to configure your fabric than to unravel a spool of cable, to say nothing of the success rate.

Cheers all!

~PJ

* That’s lowercase ‘t,’ id est “point-to-point,” which is not the same thing as PTP.
** Minor gripe, here. Their KB calls these Layer 2.5. They are not. 2.5 is something completely different.

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