The pickiest protocol ever.
We were moving our online-mix setup to another room and to another computer. Our old setup was:
Managed Switch
- Allen&Heath Console w/ Dante card
- Mac Studio
- Mac Mini (Online Mixing Station)
New setup:
Managed Switch
- Allen&Heath Console w/ Dante card
- Mac Studio
- 2nd Managed Switch
- Mac Mini (Streaming Computer)
- MacBook Pro (Online Mixing Station)
Problems I ran into once it was all setup:
- MacBook Pro would appear in the list of computers in Dante Controller, but wouldn't show any info or really be part of the network.
- Mac Mini didn't show all the info for all the computers
First Round of Fixes
Our 2nd manged switch is a Netgear switch and I had to turn off DHCP (which I thought I had already done).
Update the 2nd switch firmware to disable Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE)
We used a flat ethernet cable to run from the 2nd managed switch to the MacBook Pro. I replaced it with a different cable.
Once this was done I could see 3 out of the 4 devices on the Dante network at all times and things were reliable. But I could never get the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro to be on at the same time. Every time I'd put the MBP on the network the Mac Mini would "inherit" the MBP's IP address.
I gave the Mini a static IP but the same behavior still occurred.
I realized that I was using the USB-C to Ethernet adapter on my MBP that was previously used on the Mini. It seems there's some cache somewhere in the Dante network that remembers network adapters? Even static IPs on both the Mini and MBP didn't fix this.
Once I put a new network adapter on the MBP it was fine. This took a while to troubleshoot because it doesn't make sense in a normal networking world. But alas, that is Dante for you.
It's all working fine now. To recap:
Dante is picky about cabling, switches, and remembers network adapters. And Controller sometimes needs to be restarted to give you accurate information. What a mess.
SOLVED! (or so I thought)
When I went back to it a few days later it was still being unreliable. The final fix was to turn off Wi-Fi on my laptop, even though other computers were on the Dante network via their Ethernet connection and had Wi-Fi turned on. I had the network interfaces in the right order but for some reason macOS was allowing all network connections to go wherever they wanted. With Wi-Fi off, it's very stable.
SOLVED!
The pickiest protocol ever. Still.
I found a fix for the "System clock has gone backwards since DVS was last run" error on macOS. It's pretty rare and is Apple's fault, but here's the cause and fix:
We are Central timezone so our computer automatically sets to Chicago. After investigating the timezone files, there are a few that have their file modified year set to 2262! One of those is Chicago. Instead of modifying its "Modified Date" (not knowing if that would cause an issue or if it would just glitch again in the future) I just chose a different city for our timezone. I chose Chihuahua, Mexico. They don't support DST so I also had to manually set the time on the Mac, but that's not a huge deal for us.
The path to the folder where the timezones are is /private/var/db/timezone/tz/2024a.1.0/zoneinfo/America/
I hope this is helpful for someone. I've found nothing helpful Audinate's website, and barely anything else except getdante.com (https://www.getdante.com/support/faq/macos-14-dvs-dante-via-system-clock-has-gone-backwards/). There's an acknowledgement that an issue exists in macOS 14 that causes this issue and that they're waiting on Apple to fix it. smh.