H9000R Front Panel?

[donrwatters]

I’ve had my H9000R for a little over a year and I love the sounds, processing power and flexibility in routing. What I don’t love is the lack of control when it won’t connect. After every reboot, random network settings are used, which makes it impossible to connect. Even when using the dedicated WiFi access point, I’m still unable to connect with my main studio PC. I end up bringing a MacBook in to the studio to connect and once that resolves the network issue, then I can connect my PC. Even then, with regular Emote crashes or random disconnects, I am growing a little weary of the network only interface functionality. If it were USB based, the experience would be much different, but we know that’s not how it was built to work.

Now that all of my whining is out of the way, when I was installing my Dante card, I noticed that the circuits for the front panel are actually built into the H9000R. Has there been any discussion about a part of the product line that would let consumers buy the front panel parts? At this point, I’m will to spend more to be able to get to the front panel config elements. My experience has just been too inconsistent and sometimes I just need to patch audio through the H9000R, and I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to accomplish this seemingly simple task. If I can’t buy a front panel, would it be possible to buy an H9000 and trade my H9000R in? I don’t want to try and sell it on the open market, but if that’s the last resort, then I will go that route.

Thanks for the consideration.

— Don

[cyborgssc]

I don’t understand the “random network settings” point. Typically a device will get the same DHCP address from the server each time, unless there is another device already assigned the address. However, most routers will allow you to reserve an address for a device based on its MAC address and then assign the same IP address every time. That means you can leave the H9000R in DHCP mode but it will always get the same IP address. Would this type of config solve your problems?

Personally, I have my H9000 connected via Ethernet to the same network switch as my studio Mac. Both are on the same LAN and get IP addresses from the same DHCP server. I believe Emote uses a Bonjour service discovery protocol to find the H9000, so it shouldn’t really matter what IP address it has as long as the protocol can do its job on your network. I wouldn’t trust Wifi for this type of activity, but perhaps it’s working for others.

[donrwatters]

cyborgssc wrote:

Typically a device will get the same DHCP address from the server each time…

My studio is an airgapped network and doesn’t allow any external network traffic and as such doesn’t have internet or a DHCP server. I too keep my H9000 connected to the same switch as the main PC. There are three VLANs on the switch that connects the H9000 and the PC. VLANs for management traffic, Dante and storage. Each VLAN is set to only allow traffic on a given port to a particular VLAN. The management port for the H9000 is set to the 10.0.0.0/16 subnet. The Dante ports are set to 169.253.0.0/16 subnets. Unfortunately, Bonjour prefers the 169.253 subnet and when a reboot happens it resets the management port to use that subnet. So, it should be easy to see how this is a problem. Main PC can’t reach a management port on 169.253, when it’s only allowed to communicate on the 10.0 subnet. So, when that happens I try to connect via the H9000 AP. The default subnet for the H9000 AP is 10.0.0.0/16. This is also the same as the rest of the management ports. So, I have to shutdown all 10.0 ports and try to connect to the H9000 AP. Most of the time the H9000 AP fails to connect or Emote crashes. Then, I end up bring in a non-studio laptop to try to connect Emote to the H9000 over the Access Point. Depending on whatever state it’s in, it will work. Sometimes, while trying to configure the network in Emote, the config will update before I’m done configuring all of the settings, since there’s no submit button. Then, I’m left in a state where the management port information is in an in between state, like right IP, wrong subnet mask. There is no default gateway, since there’s no Internet and the entire network is managed at layer 2 only.

If I had a front panel, I could see the network settings and set them appropriately. Right now, it’s a giant hassle.

[donrwatters]

donrwatters wrote:

169.253

…should be 169.254.  

[cyborgssc]

donrwatters wrote:

 My studio is an airgapped network and doesn’t allow any external network traffic and as such doesn’t have internet or a DHCP server.

Thanks for the details about your network. That’s pretty locked down. Your studio network may not have DHCP, but that’s not tied in any way to having internet access. For example, I have a Ubiquiti network that allows each VLAN to have a separate DHCP range, and each VLAN can have different access via routing and firewall rules. It’s no problem to lock down internet access (or cross-VLAN traffic) into or out of VLANs without turning off DHCP, and each port on the switch can be locked to one (or more) VLANs.

I realize that your thread is really about asking Eventide whether your H9000R can be upgraded or traded for one with a front panel, so I’ll stop here. There is definitely a network solution to your problem however, and it might be cheaper than this route.

[jbamberg]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.  The crux of the issue seems to be:

donrwatters wrote:

Unfortunately, Bonjour prefers the 169.253 subnet and when a reboot happens it resets the management port to use that subnet.

If I understand correctly, you configured a static IP address in your 10.0.0.0/16 network, but upon rebooting, the H9000R either forgot this static IP address configuration and switched to zeroconf (link-local) addressing, or was advertising Bonjour services for both the static address and the link-local one and emote preferred the latter.  Perhaps it sends out a spurious Bonjour advertisement for a link-local address in the startup process before the static address is configured.  In any case, it sounds like we have enough information to reproduce the problem.

 

[jbamberg]

donrwatters wrote:

Unfortunately, Bonjour prefers the 169.253 subnet and when a reboot happens it resets the management port to use that subnet.

Just to follow up on this – I was able to reproduce this problem, and committed a fix which we are currently testing internally.  Assuming that passes, the fix will be in the next public beta release.

[donrwatters]

Thanks for looking into it. I reall appreciate it.

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