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    Casey
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Net3 ACN Gateway Crashing - N34G-4OUT

Hey All,

I'm a dealer as well as a freelancer here in Chicago.

Today I'm out at the set of Empire Season 2 helping them shoot a couple of shots in studio.  They are having an issue that I need help troubleshooting.  I sold them the hardware (new Ion, new gateway, and a bunch of other things) around June of this year, so I have a number of vested interests in getting this fixed for them.

They have this gateway setup on a very simple network:  Netgear Prosafe Switch FS108P, Ion 2k, Airport WAP (for Ipad Mini), and this NET3 gateway.  They have an identical setup for some other stages here and are experiencing the same crashing issues.  These rigs are outputting between 600 and 1200 addresses depending on which stage they are on on a given day.  They are on for an average of 15 hours a day, and 5 or 6 days a week, and are power cycled at least once a day, usually twice a day (during moves).

4 times since July 1 they have had a gateway just completely drop connection to the consoles.  The gateway doesn't loose power, it shows as not having connectivity to the console (all four ports flashing).  They have cycled power on the entire control rig (including switches and consoles) and had it come back up.  This isn't during fades, large changes or anything.  Just sitting idle for hours, and then bang, nothing.  I'm not clear if the dimmers maintain state or turn off, but I can find out if that would inform the situation.

Today being a shooting day, there isn't much I can do to troubleshoot, or really even poke around in the GCE.  However, what should I have them look for?

The first things I thought of to check is:

Turn off RDM

Check ethernet cables

Ensure static IPs

Cycle power routinely (but they say they do already)

What else should I recommend.  It is a pretty new node, and in fact, if I had to guess, it likely isn't the node that is the issue.  To me it sounds like a networking issue.  The FS108P is unmanaged, but either way if it was working great, I wouldn't think that switch would dump connectivity for no reason.

Also, this happens to both rigs, which are both almost completely new, so it sounds like a config issue more than an anomaly.  Is there a firmware update for these gateways?  What else am I missing.

Tech support, if you want to reach out, I can send SNs, software versions, or whatever else you might want to know.

Thanks all,

Casey

Parents Reply Children
  • in reply to marcusbirkin
    Netgear Prosafe GS108PE
    Main symptom: works most of the time, but some change is attempted and all the lights go out - see also my reply to corey
  • in reply to PhilipW

    Hello Philip,

    The switch will be at fault in this situation.

    This range of Netgear switches are designed as edge switches in small business, not as standalone products in a lighting network. As such the default configuration will cause problems.

    You will need to download the "NetGear Prosafe Plus Utility" can configure the swich. The option you want to disable is "IGMP Snooping"

    The manual for "NetGear Prosafe Plus Utility" can be found here: http://www.downloads.netgear.com/files/ProSafe_Plus_Utility_3_0%20_UM_23Sept10.pdf

    Technical explanation on why these switchers don't work out of the box:

    As stated above, these switchers are designed as edge switchers, intended to extend a network in a office when you need an extra port or two. It is there intension that a central core switcher is used.

    The switch therefor doesn't want to do anything that the core switcher should be in charge of.

    IGMP Management is the function of routing multicast (in the case of a lighting network - the ACN and sACN data) to the correct location. It requires two functions to operate: IGMP Querier (Only 1 per network - On the core switch) and IGMP Snooping (enabled on every device). With out the IGMP Querier, things will work for a short time and then fail.

    These Netgear switchers don't support being an IGMP Querier as they expect this to be done by the core switch, however they do, by default, enable IGMP snooping (So that they are easy to install).

    Regards,

    Marcus

  • in reply to marcusbirkin
    Corey & Marcus:

    We've disabled RDM and set Static IP addresses for all the Net3 Gateways in the system.
    (Most were already disabled, but all of them had been dynamic IP)

    We've also disabled DHCP on the Ion console.
    This appears to have stabilized the system, as we've had no dropoffs since.

    We were able to make these fixes and stabilize the system largely through your collective help here in this forum, and with extensive assistance from the Tech Support folks (special thanks to Ezra who worked patiently with me on the phone last Friday). Thanks you , all, for your expertise and assistance!
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