Make Dante Controller - Device safety pincodes global

 Imagine the following situation:

You run sound infrastructure at a theatre, broadcast company or other venue which often hosts guests. Your Dante infrastructure consists of two types of devices:

a) fixed devices with patched connections that should not be touched by anyone (amps, loudspeakers, a Vivace system, wireless mics, a stagebox, a Sennheiser MobileConnect station, etc)

b) devices which other people may want to, or need to, connect to (mixing board, maybe a Mac laptop with a DVS, maybe a video beamer, etc) in order to either stream their content (backing tracks, videos etc) or make a multitrack live recording

How do you make the system as safe as possible while allowing for enough freedom to use it as you and other people see fit, without any limits to creativity?

The expensive solution is the Dante User Manager, which is not affordable for smaller theatre venues.

If you have a Dante Controller, there is an option to lock devices which should not be messed with by typing in a safety pincode. If you want to change any patches on those devices, you first need to type in the pincode, and only if this pincode is correct do you get access to the Dante device.

So far, so good. However, if Dr. Evil tags along, has a Dante Controller installed on his laptop and patches his network cable into any of your Dante switches, he can, again, access ANY of your Dante devices on his own Dante Controller, from his laptop - with the potential to wreak havoc on your entire infrastructure.

There would be an easy workaround:

Make the safety pincodes of locked Dante devices global. If any Dante device is secured with a pincode, no one can access it again without entering said safety pincode. (Perhaps there should be a smart reset function as well, in case people forget passwords, like resetting the pincode by sending an automatically generated reset pincode to the e-mail account registered with the Dante Controller.)

That way, people could patch their connections e. g. to the mixing board, but you would feel safe knowing that they cannot access e. g. the main amps and change the output.

Bonus feature (maybe for a small fee): Enable locking of individual channels, globally. This way, a guest may be able to patch their backing tracks e. g. on a Stereo LR track channel 31 and 32, but not on, say, channel 1 and 2 which maybe goes directly to the Main LR PA.

I believe in open source technology wherever it is accessible, and while I am grateful that Audinate provides free training for their certificates, it would be great to provide a downscaled version of the User Manager for free or a smaller fee which is affordable for smaller venues (like an annual subscription for ~50 USD - maybe, since theatres are public venues, with a sponsoring partnership, i. e. putting the Dante logo in some official theatre publications, or similar).

Do share this with other people if you think the idea is useful.