Hi! I had a bit of a problem today. I was working on installing LED's onto scenery in our workshop. I was running Nomad on my MacBook Pro, connected via my handy Gadget II to the LED controller. Works great! I had been working for around 8 hours and was about to go home, disconnected my USB Dongle and Gadget II, closed my MacBook and put it in my bag.
Moments later, I got a call from an operator friend of mine working on the stage next to the workshop, asking me to come help diagnose weird behaviour in his desk. Channels were flashing that weren't even patched. I go and take a look, and just as I enter the control room the channels were fading out. We start troubleshooting and soon I start to suspect my laptop having something to do with this. Long story short and a quick experiment later, we find out that at some point during my packing up in the workshop the laptop must have sent sACN data to the addresses not owned by the Eos on the stage. The fading out is caused by the Sensor racks Data Loss timeout 180 seconds later, or just as I entered the control room.
When I booted up earlier in the day, my MacBook was connected to Wifi, to the in-house internet. We have Wifi for the lighting on the stage, for the remote app. My laptop has connected to it before and so it has most likely automatically joined it as it might have been in range.
After careful thought and self loathing since realising this, I understand there are things I could have done differently to prevent this. E.g. tell my MacBook to never join the lighting Wifi automatically. But, given that most if not all consumer OS's will default to always join Wifi's automatically; allowing any unsuspecting tech running sACNview or Nomad on a Wireless NIC to accidentally send sACN data if his laptop decides to join a lighting Wifi - how can I protect my lighting networks and shows from these kinds of accidental sACN streams?
Should I start blocking traffic on the switches to only allow my Eos, Paradigm, Hippo and DMX nodes to send sACN (the usual ones we have sending data as part of a show)?
Or is this maybe something that could be handled by Nomad better? I feel like it shouldn't just hop between SSID's so seamlessly, is that something anyone actually would like to happen without any kind of notification?
I am usually very careful but after seeing how easily this accidental error occurred, I feel like this was bound to happen sometime. This was during showtime.
Thanks, and sorry to the lumen gods.
