MA2 console being restricted on an ETC system

Oh man, did I not find a fix, but I do have information and a workaround.

The show file we worked from was built by the touring LD who toured with a PC and a wing, which we patched into our rig. When I subbed in my own machine one morning and tested every universe, I got full response from EVERYTHING. My show file was brand new on a brand new install of the MA software. I don't know anything about the settings on my machine at the time, but everything worked flawlessly. I'd start troubleshooting on the MA side, not the ETC side.

Our functional workaround was to simply port all the dimmer racks to a free universe, thus allowing MA to output to say universes 13 and 14 for the conventionals. We didn't have any serious issues once we did that.

Interesting. Thanks for the quick reply!

I’ve had the same thing happen. I remember having full control of everything just the other day. Then when I came in today I couldn’t control several dimmers. They worked perfectly fine on our Ion but nothing I did could make the MA control it.

I tried your advice and changed the dimmers to a different universe and it works! That’s really strange why universe 1 has some restricted addresses. When I examined it with sACNview it shows that the MA was sending output and was the winner of the address, but the dimmer didn’t seem to think so.

I’ll just stick with it on a separate universe until I have some more time to play around with it some more. Thanks for your help!

I had this problem a while back.  Depending on which software version you're using on the MA, you need to set the sACN priority in the console setup.  In some versions, the default priority is null, which doesn't conform to the standard.

[Setup] > {Network Protocols} > sACN tab
Set Priority to 100 (typical)
Set Protocol to "Final"

Okay!!!! So I've got this problem again on an entirely different system this time. So I'm looking at basically the same setup. 3x sensor 3 racks, all nodes are single port, paradigm is still involved, and I'm running an Ion (windows 7) as my house desk.

So the visiting company has an MA2 Light, not the *newest* software release, but less than 6 months behind.

This time I have basically the same problem. MA was able to control virtually any dimmer that's programmed into looks in paradigm, but anything outside that (moving light power, stage wash, etc) would not go through.

Just like last time I look in sACN view and see that MA is supposed to be the winning console, but the dimmers disagree.

What's more! MA refuses to control anything in dimmer world if my Ion is not connected to the system AND operating as a primary console, even if nothing is patched in the Ion. 

Now, the LD had control of enough of the stage wash with my console connected that we were able to get to work, so we ran with it, but this morning after running a different show from the Ion the night before, MA lost control of our stage wash, but still had house lights.

I don't have a real solution but I did find that sending a DMX hard line from MA to an ETC node going into the system worked splendidly.

Unfortunately despite following the last post and setting the priority and final version in MA, we still didn't have control.

Did you set the priority at the MA console? This very much sounds like the priority is set to zero.

Priority is 100 on MA, the Ion, and Paradigm. The whole system should be HTP across the board.

Assuming the MA was in the right subnet (10.101.x.x), it sounds like you were configured correctly. Are both the MA and the ION running ratified sACN (not draft)?

MA was certainly in the right subnet, and neither console was running draft

is your whole system network based, is there hard line DMX? what is the signal path from Ion to the dimmers, how is the path from MA to the dimmers? are there different signal paths into the dimmer (e.g. network and DMX)?

You may want to use WireShark to make sure all of the network traffic is properly traversing the network. The bulk of the MA traffic is on ports 29999 and 36601. Keep in mind that MA does not implement IGMP so if your network is setup with IGMP more than likely MA products will not properly function within the network. Good luck!

Thanks for this, Kurt! We had this problem last night after our Paradigm CCS crashed, and running a hard line to a gateway for universe 1 worked like a champ.

I did note that SACNView  showed per-address priority for Paradigm, which struck me as odd, but I don’t know why it became a problem for us spontaneously when things had been fine the day before.