I work at a High School theater and we have just been approved for our first round of lighting upgrades. I’ll be replacing my Source Four pars with LED fixtures.
In this package I have (3) EP2’s ordered. One for each of my electrics. These will tie back to an NS8 switch that’s also ordered. All of these will live onstage/backstage.
In the booth at FOH I have my ETC Ion Console, Laptop and access point. My plan was to put those items on my existing Cisco managed switch and have that connected to my NS8 via a Cat6 cable.
Is there anything special I need to do to have the Cisco switch and the NS8 play nice together?
Great to hear you’ve got the go-ahead for some lighting upgrades.
Connecting your Cisco switch that lives FOH, to an NS8 situated side of stage makes perfect sense. A few comments:
If you are using sACN on your network, make sure that “IGMP Snooping” is enabled on both the NS8 and the Cisco switch. You will need to also ensure that “IGMP Querier” is enabled on one of the switches on the network. I would recommend enabling the IGMP Querier on the NS8, and disabling it on the Cisco switch.
If you are using VLANs, the connection between the Cisco switch and NS8 can be configured as a Trunk if required.
If you have a DHCP server on the network, it is possible to configure the NS8 to use a DHCP address rather than static if required. In which case, make sure you don’t incorrectly also enable a DHCP server on the NS8 itself.
I hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions.