Help! No Network Available on Dante Devices

Long story short - I started working as IT here at this church back in February. The previous IT guy made some change to the Dante network to where there would be no network connectivity at all, but all the Dante devices see each other just fine. He made this decision without consulting the any of the worship or production guys then left without any instruction. Now, they are asking me if I can figure out how to reverse what he did so that Dante devices still work AND they have network access for the internet.

I’ve been playing around with it for a few months and cannot figure out how to make this change. I noticed that the “internal network bridge” was set to off, so I was hoping it was that simple, but that didn’t help. No matter what I try, all the Dante connected devices are still visible from the controller (which is good), but there is no network available (which is what they want). They are having to connect the iMac to two different networks to work around this, which is just not their preference.

I think I’ve seen in a few places that how we have it set up is actually probably better for network, or at least more efficient. But I want to be able to at least figure out how to flip this back as an option for them regardless.

Please, I would love anyone’s help! ChatGPT only goes so far.

Hi,
it sounds like your former IT person set up VLANS (to isolate the Dante network) without trunk groups to allow you access to other networks.
I would look into this first… The other option is to start over and redesign the network to what works best for you and implement it.
Best of luck!

I would actually recommend that you keep the Dante network segregated. It is much more reliable that way! I would wager that there were some stability issues that caused your former IT person to make this change in the first place. If it worked 100% of the time before, they likely wouldn’t have taken all the time and energy to change it.

Having to connect to two different networks is trivial IMHO. Dante requires a hardwired connection regardless, and you can use the WiFi network for your regular network/internet connections. If this is a “work station” computer without Wi-Fi, adding a second network via a USB adapter again is trivial and inexpensive.