Unalbe to Consume Tags thru Multiple Switches

I am unable to get communication thru different swith on network that the producer is not hooked on. I do not have a problem with consuming on the same switch as the producer. All Tags are set for unicast and Tech Support says it should work. I can ping address of producer from the other switch devices and I can see it in RSLINX. But still on Tag Info. Any advice would be helpful. Or it's back to Tech Support in the am.

Remember that a Unicast connection supports only one Consumer.

Are you talking about moving your Consumer from the local switch to a remote switch, or adding another Consumer at the remote switch ?

You'll have to describe your Ethernet switch architecture in detail: model numbers, configurations, etc.

Information about the ControlLogix-family controllers would help too.

What is the error message shown in the Consumer's I/O tree for the Producing module ?

I have 9 consumers and 1 producer. The switches are Cisco controlled by the IT Dept. no clue on model numbers. The Error message is Connection time out. The controllers are L62. I'm not sure I can give you enough infomation at this point. But it's sounds like I should be Multicasting?

I have 2 switches. The port numbers are B1-01-12,13,14 etc. and B4-01-08,09,10 etc. My producer is on port B4 and I can consume tags on plc's that are hooked to B4 ports. I can not consume tags on plc's hooked to B1 ports.

cwal61 said:

I have 9 consumers and 1 producer.

Click to expand...

Unicast won't work for that.

cwal61 said:

The switches are Cisco controlled by the IT Dept. no clue on model numbers.

Click to expand...

Is there other non automation traffic on this network? That is a big no-no. You need this automation to be on a seperate vlan on that switch.

Talked Tech support to death. no change in status. Decided to change direction and just use Message. This is not I/O control or anything critical. I am just trying to broadcast operator ID and Password from one to all. tech support pointed me to Answer ID 24380 But it's something more down the line of the IT dept not mine. Anyway there's more than one way to skin a cat. Thanks.

PS. Ken/PLC according to AB Unicast can be use on multiple consumer's with version 16 and higher. There is a Checkbox under the advanced Tab of the produced tag to allow multiple consumers. And according to AB you have to use unicast to traverse multple switches although I was not sucessful.

Again thanks for your replies.

Thanks for posting that follow-up. I had done some re-examining of my assumptions.

I think if you configure a Produced tag for Unicast, you can still have multiple consumers but the controller is actually going to produce that tag multiple times. That is consistent both with what I know about EtherNet/IP and with the selections you can choose in RSLogix 5000.

This is, at a low level, different from producing the tag once with a Multicast target address and having it literally consumed simultaneously by multiple consumers.

With the 1756-EN2T and -EN3T the difference is probably not substantial because of their superior processing speed.