LAN Problems using 2 G5's

[rickvallance_4540]

I have set up 2 Mac G5's with Vienna Ensemble and once the participants connect the hook up is fine. Today I have been trying to connect for 15 minutes "did not respond check firewall and router settings" with no success !!! This happens quite often and is not a situation that I can live with anymore. My Macs are joined together by a simple ethernet cable. Should I a) get an ethernet router to sit between the machines which will also allow me to connect a third machine and will this solve the problem..? or b) ... give up the LAN idea and buy additional hardware midi interfaces ( amt8 or motu) for the second and third machines? I know a Vienna Instruments user who uses 3 Macs over LAN with no problems but my system has been unstable from the start . Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

[cm]

rick, it often helps to be more specific, either with the OS and what exactly you tried to connect ... it *smells* like midi over lan - if yes: the manual mentions you have to open port 11.000 for UDP

 

unfortunately the OS X firewall (10.4.x) is very cryptic when it comes to cinfiguring in detail, but the *add port to open* should do the trick.

 

other questions are:

- has your G5 gigabit or 100 mBit - if the latter make sure you have a crossover cable, only gigabit can autodetect a switch or a direct connection

- do you have any DHCP service running in your network possibly changing the assigned IPs from time to time?

- i would recommend to use fixed IPs in one of the private ranges (eg. 192.168.0.1 - 192.168.0.254 using mask 255.255.255.0)

- wording: a router is a device which _routes_ your packages somewhere (eg. to the public internet), the device to simply connect more than 2 machines is called switch (reliable 8-port gigabit switches are available at $ 150.- already)

 

if your system is unstable in general i would consider a fresh clean install followed by all relevant updates and creation of an image to save this work ...

christian

[rickvallance_4540]

Hi Christian, This is all pretty deep water for me! My system was set up by fellow Vienna Instrument user Strawinski and works faultlessly on his 3 G5's and he has set up my machines in the same way. The only KNOWN difference being that he uses a switcher/router and l have connected direct G5 to G5. I am using OSX 10.4.10 on both machines which are a ppc quad and a ppc dual 2, logic 8, VE. 2.0 The cable is a crossover cable Once the connection is made in the Midi Network setup window of the app "Audio midi setup" ... the second machine appears in the participants window... the connection is there for the day.... but making that connection can take 20 minutes. Thanks for your quick response and hope this additional information helps. rick

[cm]

unfortunately networking _is_ deep water .... (opposed to what apple likes to make us believe be it on a mac or any other computer)

 

i'd recommend to setup the computers to be in the same workgroup (do not call any domain .local on a mac!) ... either leave the default naming at *workgroup* or choose something selfexplaining without special characters.

 

also i'd make sure username (the long _and_ the short one) and password is the same

 

make sure sharing is on (no need to activate windows file sharing = SMB or ftp or www basically) - make sure the firewall is not set to stealth mode

 

provide details about possible multi-homing (more than one network interface on a machine) or internet connection sharing, provide details about how your IPs are set

 

christian