Ethernet Switches

[Steven Devino]

I am curious what Ethernet switches you all use with your rigs and why you selected the one you did. 

Happy Spring BTW.

Steve

RF Venue 

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Steven Devino

[Kyle Jensen]

Netgear M4250s, mostly, and Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 24s

— Kyle Jensen

(Sound Designer)

On Apr 4, 2024, at 15:07, Steven Devino <sde...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[page daniel]

One of my clients installed some reasonable priced switches that worked
fine with Dante installed wireless for a couple of years, then they
added a computer running virtual Dante and sound started dropping out.
Now they use the Yamaha switches with no problem.

My Dante enabled racks have two Yamaha switches in one rack space and I
have no problems with having enough (10) and no complaints. Oh in the
rack I built power cables with locking right angle IEC connectors. I get
to sleep all night, no phone calls, and no text messages.

I tried to find some other suitable switches at a lesser price, but
during covid no one could get me the ones I wanted to try.

page

[Rhys Dawson]

Had the best luck with layer 3 Arubas thus far. 

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[Nick Kourtides]

Page - DVS on Macs requires a multicast port-forward-all configuration in the switches for the ports with DVS machines connected. This effectively disables IGMP snooping on that port and eliminates the clock errors and dropouts with DVS. There's an Audinate tech doc on it that is surprisingly hard to locate. 

https://global.audinate.com/learning/faqs/mac-osx-shows-listening-under-the-clock-status-tab-in-dante-controller?lang=z

I dislike the Ubiquitis, really enjoy the Netgear AV line for ease and confidence of setup, and am perfectly happy with Cisco SG-xxx.

Nick Kourtides

Sound Design

(he/him)

+1 215 915 0159

nickko...@gmail.com

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[page daniel]

Thanks Nick,

When one is spending thousands of dollars per channel for wireless,
spending a few hundred more for switches is no big deal.
Currently most of my clients are still running analog, but I need to get
up to date on Dante and other protocols. Glad to know you do not like
the Ubiquitis as at one time I was taking a hard look at them. I only
have two big systems with Yamaha switches, so it is not a a big part of
my inventory but I do enjoy having a Dante card in one of my mixers.

page Daniel

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[Steven Devino]

I'd also like to know what you all are connecting to the switch or wished you could connect to the switch.   

Thanks

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Steven Devino

[Nick Kourtides]

All networked devices (consoles, receivers, IEM transmitters, matrix processors, etc) and computers for screen and file sharing, remote control 

All Dante devices 

WAPs for iPads, Wavetool, console remote apps 

On an average off Broadway musical, I’ll wind up with maybe a dozen Dante devices, 3 or 4 computers, plus additional tech table machines, 1 or 2 WAPs, a console or two, etc. 

Small projects fit on 4 switches, with a couple of 20 ports for control and Dante networking, and smaller 10 ports for secondary redundancy. Often I preswitch non-Dante RF on a dumb switch and get it all on a single port of the managed control network. 

Larger projects are trunked, mixed fiber/copper, and are adding things like IP comms 

N

Nick Kourtides

Sound Design

(he/him)

+1 215 915 0159

nickko...@gmail.com

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[Jonathan Woytek]

So I'm small potatoes over here doing a few high school musicals and fall plays every year, and some music gigs. My full-time sustenance is as a devops engineer and wrangling all kinds of hardware and software into working systems. I provide this as background because I'm probably being way more complex than I need to be, but it's fun, flexible, and functional for me. 

My system snake is Dante over CAT6. I have switches at FoH and stage. The stage-side switches are co-located with I/O. The FoH switches are in a rack with power and a utility drawer for FoH accessories. I run a Yamaha CL1, so the console is Dante-native. All of my I/O are 16x8 units (Tio1608's). This configuration provides flexibility for different types of shows. A music gig may just use a single 16x8 I/O at the stage, maybe a second for a larger group. Musicals I usually have to run wireless land at FoH, so I'll have one I/O unit at the stage for orchestra and stage mics, and one or two at FoH for wireless mics. My QLab rig, multitrack recording setup, and measurement system (SMAART) are all Dante via DVS. 

Here's where it gets over-complicated. I chose to run in a redundant configuration, with two switches at each location. They're all powered off of the same AC feed, so it isn't fully redundant, but that doesn't mean anything for me--I am never in a situation where I have redundant AC. In my other life, though, I've had switches just decide that they've completed their lifecycle, and/or ports flake out, so I thought running redundant switches would provide some peace of mind there, especially because that's not necessarily an easy problem to diagnose on the fly. All four switches provide PoE, so I can run an access point for my iPad to check the mix from different parts of the house, check and set backstage monitor levels, etc. I also sometimes use an additional switch when I am configuring my network-capable wireless units (sadly, none of them are Dante). 

One switch is dedicated to all primary Dante traffic. The second switch is split, with half of the ports for Dante secondary traffic and half for show control network traffic. The primary snake line carries only a single VLAN for Dante primary traffic. The secondary snake line carries two VLANs, one for Dante secondary and one for show control.

I'm running eight-port managed PoE Ubiquiti switches everywhere right now. They perform fine but I'm less a fan of their configuration system over time. I much prefer switches that I can hit via SSH or a web page and configure them without needing another piece of hardware or a computer that has the management software and configuration database. 

I'm strongly considering dropping the redundant switches and Dante configuration and instead installing a single 16-port switch on either side, and carrying a couple of dumb 8-port switches in the spares box. I'd like to get some more easily managed switches and I'm looking closely at the Netgear AV line, and considering whether I really need the complexity I have designed into my existing network. I know things might go to hades at a bad time, though, and stopping to swap out a switch seems like a good way to have an entire audience staring at me. There are reasons I chose the techie life, and that anxiety is one of them! :) 

jonathan

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[Chet Leonard]

love the locking IEC connectors!

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[page daniel]

On 2024-04-05 10:09, Chet Leonard wrote:
> love the locking IEC connectors!
>

So redundant AC is required.

I use backups on some devices. 15 volt DC usually requires a booster,
not expensive, but I have to wait on them to take the slow boat from the
far east.

For 120 AC low power. I use consumer grade backups with both DC and AC
that give me power and recharge at the same time.

While talking about gadgets, battery chargers have a loss of power
alarm. Also cables plugged into wall receptacles have screwed on
retainers, while in a regular used theater for audio gear and other
mission critical I would suggest that an electrician replace the edison
blade with a 15 or 20 amp rated twist lock.

I have built some boxes that I feed from two 15 volt power supplies one
of which can be a 12 volt battery with a booster. Simple and ready for
a power supply failure. Don't have those since I have upgraded most
critical gear the higher current units. Two to three times required is
my standard.

Yeah, why put in redundant Dante without redundant power?

page

[Seablade -]

So for a while for Dante I just ran UniFi switches and it worked fine, have them in about a dozen installs around me atm probably.  The interface can be hit and miss depending on who you are and your situation, and for me personally I wish I could do command line setup and tie it into Ansible more easily, but outside of that it is perfectly fine in most ways, though I wish they would stop 'improving' things that hides or removes some functionality.

Recently I have started using the M4250s instead for tech areas, and UniFi for more general network usage, and been fairly happy.  Got a few clients on that now.

      Thomas Vecchione

On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 3:07 PM Steven Devino <sde...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[rbing...@juno.com]

For my own personal systems, I just use basic dumb TP Link switches and if I need DHCP then I throw in a cheap router to do that. Most of the time I have very simple sets ups with a handful of Dante gear, two or three computers and a console and that’s about it.  I will often hard assign my Dante gear IPs and then let things like computers use DHCP so I don’t need to keep changing the settings on my laptop between the venue and home.  I don’t really use Wi-Fi in my set ups often but when I do, sometimes I’ll let that be the DHCP.  The reason I went this route is pretty simple.  It’s cheap and there also isn’t anything to set up.  You plug them in, if you hard assign all the IPs then you don’t even need a DHCP service.  Most of the time that I do have Wi-Fi set up it’s because I’m letting the band mix their own In Ear monitor mixes in the pit and I use an X32 rack for that and let them use their own phone or tablet to adjust things.  I’ll typically make sure there is a tablet or a computer around so if the musician doesn’t have or want to use their smartphone to mix they don’t have to and I make sure there is someone trained to help them with the basics as much as possible.  It’s cheap, it’s simple and I can pick up new ones at my local Microcenter.  It just works for me.  Other than Dante traffic on the network it’s just basic computer networking, some remote desktop stuff.  When I use my software mixing console (Audio Mixing Platform)  it also has a client server set up between the host computer doing all the mixing and the remotes you use to run the console, often multiple remotes.  So far I’ve yet to have any issues with running out of bandwidth even with fairly good sized channel counts of Dante, 3 or more console remotes, a remote desktop connection to the playback computer and musicians using Wi-Fi to mix their headphones/in-ears.

 

On my consulting projects I’m typically specifying the Netgear AV switches or their rebadged QSC Q-Sys equivalents.  The Cisco SG series also work well in my experience.  These are systems that are being installed in facilities and set up by AV contractors.  With a few exceptions, most contractors have and want to install one of those two brands and know how to use those with ease.  I’ve let some of them put in substitutes if they really wanted something else or sometimes the client wants something else (especially schools want what they use elsewhere).  As long as they do the job I think they are all about the same.  I think I’ve only once had to say, no we’re putting in what was specified.  And I had a mildly heated debate with one IT department at a University.  Obviously in this type of work, robustness, known product lines and familiarity with AV contractors and providing plenty of POE trump the price tag.  I’ll sometimes suggest the cheap off the shelf dumb switches to the end users for things like RF racks that have Dante based receivers in them or for tech table use, etc..  Just so they don’t have to plug everything directly into their better switches located in an AV rack.

 

Richard B Ingraham

[Paul Kraus]

See below ...

> On Apr 5, 2024, at 10:57, Jonathan Woytek <woy...@DRYROSE.COM> wrote:
>
> I'm running eight-port managed PoE Ubiquiti switches everywhere right now. They perform fine but I'm less a fan of their configuration system over time. I much prefer switches that I can hit via SSH or a web page and configure them without needing another piece of hardware or a computer that has the management software and configuration database.

All of the Ubiquiti switches can be managed via ssh command line.

I have never tried managing them via a local web connection (which you *can* do with Ubiquiti routers, either USG or EdgeRouters).

Ping me off-list for details of how to use ssh with the switches.

—
Paul Kraus

[Seablade -]

Managing via ssh and command line does not tend to persist past firmware updates.  It can be done but is not ideal.

There is a terraform provider now that I am intending to test but for now ash management is not a great solution on those like it would be for most switches that support it.

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[Paul Kraus]

There were certain features (and I do not recall which right now) that were only configurable via the CLI. They were documented in the forums and not in any formal documentation. We had to use a couple of those in a large installation about 5 or 6 years ago. Unfortunately, the engineer who handled that is no longer with my firm. We did NOT have any problems with the config getting lost due to FW updates. I can see, if you change a configuration that is managed by UniFi controller, the next time the UniFi controller provisions the switch your change will be overwritten.

Given that those features were not manageable via the UniFi Controller, I’m not sure a tool like terraform would have helped.

[Seablade -]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 10:38 AM Paul Kraus <pk1...@gmail.com> wrote:

There were certain features (and I do not recall which right now) that were only configurable via the CLI. They were documented in the forums and not in any formal documentation. We had to use a couple of those in a large installation about 5 or 6 years ago. Unfortunately, the engineer who handled that is no longer with my firm. We did NOT have any problems with the config getting lost due to FW updates. I can see, if you change a configuration that is managed by UniFi controller, the next time the UniFi controller provisions the switch your change will be overwritten.

So some time back Unifi switched from a standard Vyatta based config ont heir hardware to their own UniFi-OS.  As a result on most of their recent hardware you lost the ability, for instance, to set config.json which I suspect is how you managed those features before (And yes there we re a few).  The newer UniFi OS Devices act very differently on the commandline now and it is much harder to manage via the command line.

 

Given that those features were not manageable via the UniFi Controller, I’m not sure a tool like terraform would have helped.

There are still some of those features, but given the lack of resiliency and the switch to UniFi OS which at the very least changes how they operate if not removed them, it is not a good idea to depend on them and in the new OS is more difficult to configure in many cases as well for the record.

Terraform doesn't interact directly with the UniFi controller, it utilizes a poorly to undocumented API instead so that it does work in a similar fashion.  As I said I haven't tested it though myself.

Trust me, I have been looking for a good solution I can tie into Ansible (Which would use SSH) for some time as I manage a dozen clients on UniFi at least, and really want to set up templates for consistency between sites, but since the switch to UniFi-OS from Vyatta then that option really went away.  The terraform solution does look promising but is not as powerful as the older Vyatta commandlines were.

        Thomas