Understanding Route and Clock Masters in WheatNet-IP

Understanding Route and Clock Masters in WheatNet-IP

Every WheatNet-IP system has a Route Master Blade and a Clock Master Blade.

These Blades are automatically elected within your system. Depending upon how large your facility is, you may want to set certain Blades to be the preferred ones for your system. For example, if you have several Blades in a central rack room with dedicated Uninterrupted Power Supplies, you would rather these Blades to be designated Master over a blade in a small studio that used to be a broom closet that doesn't have a UPS.

What Does the Route Master Do?
As the name implies, the Route Master is the Blade that keeps track of all of the Blades in the system and issues routing commands within the system. The Route Master allows new Blades and PC driver Blades to join the system. While Blades send backups of their configuration to all other Blades eligible to become a Route Master to each other, when you are replacing a Blade with a new one, it is the Route Master that sends the configuration to that new blade. The Route Master is also the blade that fires Salvos and Associated Connections when they are triggered.

Some blades, by rule, cannot serve as Route Master. This includes PC Driver Blades, Tieline Gateways, and Stageboxes.

What Does the Clock Master Do?
The Clock Master is the Blade that sends the WheatNet-IP (WNIP) Metronome for all blades to lock to. If you are using PTP as your external sync, the Clock Master Blade will lock to PTP, then all other Blades will lock to the Clock Master Blade using the WNIP Metronome.

Info
If you are using DARS as external sync (locking clock to AES input 8 of a Blade as set on the Info tab of Navigator) the system will make the Blade with the primary external reference the Clock Master first, fall back to the secondary external reference second, then elect a master as described in this article if no external reference is available.

Some blades, by rule cannot serve as Clock Master. This includes LXE Mix Engine Blades, VMX Virtual Blades, Stageboxes, Tieline Gateways, and PC Driver Blades.

The WheatNet-IP system prefers that Route and Clock Master be on separate blades whenever possible.

How Masters Are Elected
When a Blade enters the system, it looks to see if a Master already exists before deciding whether to call an election. There are three criteria applied within this order:

1. The highest software revision number always wins.
2. If all Blades are at the same software revision, break the tie based upon the Master Preference number.
3. If all Blades are at the same Master Preference number, break the tie based upon the longest runtime.

How To Set Master Preferences
The Master Preference number is set on the Blade Admin tab in Navigator. 

Notes
This function is hidden by default in Navigator. To display the function, go to the Preferences tab and check "Enable Advanced Controls"
When the function is no longer hidden, the Blade Admin tab will look like this:
The default settings have Route Master set to 80 and clock to 50.
If you uncheck the default, you can change this number from 99 (highest) to 0 (off).
If you uncheck the box next to Route and Clock, you will disable the Blade from voting in an election.
Warning
Wheatstone recommends that you do NOT disable a Blade from voting in an election, because if no master exists, the Blade will not complete its startup process until it detects a master on the system. If there's a Blade you really don't want to become master, set it to 1 so if you're doing maintenance on the bench it will still finish booting up.
Our Recommended Strategy
Say you have 6 blades in your rack room.
Set the first to Route 99
Set the second to Route 98
Set the third to Route 97
Set the fourth to Clock 99
Set the fifth to Clock 98
Set the sixth to Clock 97

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