Glad to see the forum's back online - seemed to be down earlier today when I first tried to post this.
Anyway, here's the basis of an e-mail I sent to tech support this morning - while they're thinking about it, I thought maybe someone on here may have some words of wisdom to share on the matter ...
If a Net3 show control gateway is being run via PoE from a switch, is it in any way fussy about the length of ethernet cable that's feeding it?
The reason I ask is that we had some odd issues last night when setting up one of our show control gateways. It was initially plugged directly into one of our HP PoE switches via a long (approx. 20m) ethernet cable - it powered up, the LED on the front indicated network connectivity, but the device wasn't found on the system (either on the 'About system' screen in the browser or via the GCE). Subsequent swapping of cables, etc. produced the following results :
G/way plugged direct to switch via 20m Cat5 cable - not found.
G/way plugged direct to switch via shorter (~5m) Cat5 cable - working.
G/way connected to switch via network patch line (~8m) and 2m Cat5 cable - working.
G/way connected to switch via different patch line (~5m) and previous (~5m) Cat5 cable - not found.
My first suspicion is that when the network cable exceeds a certain length, PoE isn't a viable option and an external PSU is needed - am I on the right lines? Or are there other factors in play here?
