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One for the Artnet gurus?


sleah

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Sorry the title doesn't give much away!

 

Bottom line: I have a PC running EOS that spits out DMX via an ArtNet node. No problem with that, I have it all working nicely.

It is a private little LAN with no connection to the outside world, which is the ideal situation as I understand it is bad practice to run ArtNet across a 'normal' LAN, in my case a school network, due to the traffic it creates.

 

Now what I'd like to do is to be able to RDP or TeamViewer in to said PC from a PC on the main LAN.

I can fit a second network card configured on the main LAN, however I'm concerned there will then be ArtNet traffic going out on the main LAN...

What I'm unsure about, is if the traffic is generated by communication between the software and the ArtNet node, or does the software spit out the traffic all over the place (regardless of if it finds an ArtNet node), so creating lots of traffic on both LANs (and effectively defeating the object of the separate LAN for ArtNet)

 

Hope that makes some kind of sense!

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Do you have suitably clever network switches on the main LAN to set up VLANs? This way you could patch the port the lighting computer is plugged into to, say, VLAN 2, similarly with the 2nd network card of the viewer computer, then the traffic between the two should never see the outside world.

 

We use this sort of setup to get our 'theatre net' up to our office at work- IT have set up a VLAN (think virtual 'tunnel') over their network to work between a patch panel in the basement where we have 'theatre' and 'IT' sockets close to each other, and a socket in our office so that I can work on theatre net, albeit on a dedicated machine rather than dual purpose, but the principal is the same.

 

Edited to add:

Also, have a read up on 'limited broadcast' vs 'directed broadcast'- with the correct numbers in your IP/subnet settings, you should be able to control how far the traffic is escaping to.

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Depending on your software, I'm not certain on EOS but QLab on Mac for us allows us to select an output network device for ArtNet or lets us fire it across all.

With proper switches and Unicast as opposed to broadcast on ArtNet, is the traffic that bad? Is it the polling traffic rather than output that's the problem?

 

Our show control computer is a Mac Mini, with ArtNet via the ethernet (directly patched as we don't run any other hardware), and we turn the wifi on & off and connect to the school's guest access wifi to access internet on it for content / updates etc. (Then turn Wifi off again when finished)

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VLANs are a possibility, however I'm not concerned about that aspect.

 

Tom has nailed what I'm concerned about. I'll dig in to EOS and see if it's possible to tell it to ONLY look at a given subnet (or single IP) for ArtNet.

 

As for wifi, I'd go with a extra ethernet cabled connection (card or USB adaptor) to avoid anything wireless. On some shows I'm using 12 channels of Line6 so anything else using wireless is avoided at all costs!

5.8Ghz is an option of course ;)

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On eos consoles (and I assume nomad) in the shell's network settings you can enable/disable protocols for each network interface. I've only got one network interface on my mac at the moment so can't test it but I assume that you would see both on a PC and be able to simply un-tick the box for the WAN port
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I may be way off here (as I know squat about anything other than show control LAN setups) but I always assumed that if I unicast directly between IPs then I'd not be doing anything unpleasant to 'the system'. I was doing this today on the university network firing ArtNet between machines in one of our Mac suites which is connected to the rest of the institutional network, simply using the network adaptor and whatever gear is hidden upstream. My guess would be that broadcast is blocked.

 

Might go and ask IT, although in my experience they are rarely happy about anything you do - so best not to tell them. :-)

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If you unicast then the packet will go to the switch which should forward it just to the target device (if it's on the same switch). So the rest of the network won't see it. However artnet also sends out broadcast discovery packets and they will go everywhere.
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If you unicast then the packet will go to the switch which should forward it just to the target device (if it's on the same switch). So the rest of the network won't see it. However artnet also sends out broadcast discovery packets and they will go everywhere.

 

Is it possible to limit the range of these packets via a subnet limitation somewhere?

 

I spoke to IT support (not the network guys) who weren't sure but thought broadcast was blocked somewhere in the system. I haven't had irate network engineers appear yet but it was only about a half hour test.

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I haven't had irate network engineers appear yet but it was only about a half hour test.

 

Oh, they won't appear...you'll just find everything suddenly stops working for no apparent reason ;)

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