iMac/Dante - two interfaces

[Jay Ashworth]

In my new house, we have an iMac in the booth, that I would like to Dante up to the Yamaha QL-5.

I have gathered that one does not want to mix one's Dante and general IP traffic. [ The story of how I gathered this would curl your hair. ] I *suspect* that I want to run the Dante into the onboard GigE, and use a dongle for the IP network -- can anyone confirm or deny?

Would I be better with Ethernet over Lightning/Thunder or just go with one of the USB 3 interfaces? I'm sure the non-USB dongles will cost three times as much, but I suspect they're not worth it.

 

[FMEng]

That's what I've done before, dual network the machine with a USB network adapter. I used the built in network interface for Dante, and the USB adapter for internet and other less taxing functions. The USB adapters work fine for general use. In fact, they'd probably work for a modest number of Dante channels, too.

 

[MNicolai]

Any form of Ethernet adapter rated for 1 gigabit will do. Multiple NIC’s is a common way to isolate the networks.

 

[halenono]

I have gathered that one does not want to mix one's Dante and general IP traffic. [ The story of how I gathered this would curl your hair. ]

I'm curious as to what trouble you have run into that led you to this conclusion.

 

[StradivariusBone]

In my experience, Macs tend to play less nice with multiple subnets as opposed to windows machines. At least when a browser is involved. I'd be interested to know why that is or if there is a valid reason. Our lighting rig is a PC, hardwire is to the nodes and wifi is for internet. Our media playback rig is a mac and has never been happy when we tried to put one network on wifi and another on the copper.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

One reason, Strad, why I want both networks wired, even if one needs a dongle.

They'll be completely separate subnets, since Dante is generally APIPA IME.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

I'm curious as to what trouble you have run into that led you to this conclusion.

Someone inadvertantly plugged an ethernet cable into the Dante out port on our Qu-16, instead of the Eth port, and our entire network melted down into slag. Regularly. For a couple weeks, all day long, whenever that cart was powered on.

 

[rphilip]

Some recent mac's internal network ports had problems for a while with Dante. I think it was only 10G ports and I think I've read that this problem is now fixed.

If you have layer 2 switches that you can manage I've had success with doing vlan tagging. Dante must be on the hardware interface, the "public" internet is then on a tagged vlan. This of course doesn't work if you can't manage the switches or want to keep them fully independent. I've got probably a half dozen mac's that have been doing this for years.

I agree that if you want it fully separate then using a cheap dongle for the "internet" is probably the way to go. Unless you plan lots of large file transfers I don't know that performance will matter much.

I think to keep things "happy" you'll need to set the service order so the "internet" connection is higher (on screen which implies priority).

 

[macsound]

I'd suggest to buy the Apple ethernet adapter.
Using a 3rd party USB ethernet adapter on a mac will usually require a sketchy driver to make it work. While it's not usually malicious, its completely obscured to the user if the adapter or driver is the link thats failing.

 

[MNicolai]

That sounds like there are some Layer 2 unmanaged switches in the network which cause multicast traffic to become broadcast and get repeated out to every port on the system, Fast Ethernet switches instead of gigabit, or something is just not configured appropriately for media traffic on the network. On a properly deployed network, Dante can peacefully coexist with other systems. That's what it's designed for. Not that I would lodge a fight with campus IT when you can remedy by adding a NIC, but the days of "AV needs a dedicated network...or else" have passed. It's easier, yes, but far from mandatory. In corporate environments it's basically the expectation that Dante can integrate seamlessly into a corporate LAN.

 

[Jay Ashworth]

That sounds like there are some Layer 2 unmanaged switches in the network which cause multicast traffic to become broadcast and get repeated out to every port on the system, Fast Ethernet switches instead of gigabit, or something is just not configured appropriately for media traffic on the network. On a properly deployed network, Dante can peacefully coexist with other systems. That's what it's designed for. Not that I would lodge a fight with campus IT when you can remedy by adding a NIC, but the days of "AV needs a dedicated network...or else" have passed. It's easier, yes, but far from mandatory. In corporate environments it's basically the expectation that Dante can integrate seamlessly into a corporate LAN.

Well, in this case, there was a little tributary switch in the way, but the core is my own Netgear 724 semi-managed, not operated by IT. Since having the Dante output on the A&H connected to *anything* wasn't a Thing, I just moved the wire and didn't diagnose.

 

[firewater88]

I'd suggest to buy the Apple ethernet adapter.
Using a 3rd party USB ethernet adapter on a mac will usually require a sketchy driver to make it work. While it's not usually malicious, its completely obscured to the user if the adapter or driver is the link thats failing.

Apple dosen't make an adpater for Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to ethernet. They push the Belikn one. It does not need drivers and is plug and play. I have 4 of them on my Mac mini FOH for all the wired networks in my space. Have had no issues with Dante on them.