That Base-II you replaced for me made this quite obvious. It would not
work in any port unless forced to 10HD. That's the one I did all of the
polarity swapping on and nothing would make it work with auto-nego.
Worked perfectly fine plugged into any old dumb or managed switch.
Nothing MikroTik worked. Well besides forcing 10 half.
On 1/26/2015 4:19 PM, Forrest Christian (List Account) wrote:
As many of you have heard, I've had a bit of a irritation for quite
some time about Mikrotik's seeming inability to consistently wire
their Ethernet ports correctly for 10mb/s operation - specifically
paying attention to the correct *polarity* of the wires in the
Ethernet pairs. This wreaks havoc with devices which need the correct
polarity to work, such as my SiteMonitor Base II's. For instance,
every other switchport on the RB250GS Ethernet switch doesn't work.
I don't remember if it's 1 3 and 5 which doesn't work, or if it's 2
and 4, but it is definitely every other one. Swapping the wires in
one of the pairs fixes the problem, so I'm sure that's the cause.
I've tried over the years to get MikroTik to care enough to even
acknowledge the issue. Of course, the problem isn't their lack of
compliance with the standard, but instead it must be my problem
instead, so I've resolved to just dealing with the occasional need to
train a customer to try a different port.
I should note that as far as I can tell, this isn't a common problem
with other switch vendors. In fact, I don't think I have a single
non-MikroTik device in my possession which doesn't work with the
standard-complying 10Mb/s Ethernet port in the base unit - and I have
quite a variety that I've tried. Not sure how MikroTik is so good at
getting this not-very-consistently wrong, and everyone else seems to
almost always get it right.
But, that's not really my rant. It just provides the background.
Over the last year or so I've slowly put together the internal network
at home and at PacketFlux out of MikroTik devices. Quite frankly,
they have a feature set I appreciate, and I can generally overlook the
issues, but they're starting to get on my nerves, the most recent ones
being:
* Routerboard 850Gx2 doesn't show master/slave configuration options
in webfig (ok this one is minor).
* That same routerboard 850Gx2, won't link with a 10Mb/s device at all
unless you turn *off* autonegotiation and hard code it 10Mbs. Well,
except when you try to replicate it later, in which case it works fine
with autonegotiation on. Fine, be that way. Well, until hours later
it decides to not link with that exact same 10Mb/s device and you have
to set it back to not negotiate. Fortunately, hardcoding the speed
seems to always work so I'm leaving it that way.
* Disabling advertising speeds seems to be generally non-functional on
some devices. Want to negotiate at only 10/100, so turn off 1000M
checkboxes? Fine, except the damn thing still autonegotiates at 1000M.
And what really set me off this weekend:
Remember that RB250GS? Well, I recently upgraded my main
development/desktop computer (much faster now, thanks), but am still
moving things off my old one. So I want it up to be able to VNC into
it. In addition, I have a newly installed Linux machine here as
well. The physical hardware for both of these devices are Dell
workstations from about the same time period. They both have 10/100
Ethernet cards which have been autonegotiating at 100Mb/s with when
plugged into a rb2011 (which has it's own unique issues as well).
So this weekend, I decide to move these things off the top of the r&d
bench to under it. I decide to install that RB250GS under the bench
as well to plug them into and give me a couple more spare ports, and
so I get it plugged in and linked up to another MikroTik (amazingly
this link works just fine), and then hook both dell machines (The Win7
one and the Linux one) to the RB250GS.
A few hours later, I copy some stuff from the old Win7 box to my new
one. Many gigs of stuff to be specific - something like 40GB or
thereabouts. Windows is nicely telling me that it's going to take
'more than a day' and that I'm only transferring at 1MB/s (yeah
10Mb/s). WTF?
So I get digging. The (@#*$ 250GS is only linking at 10Mb/s. Check
the other machine: 10Mb/s also. Fine. Negotiation issue. Go in,
make sure that the port is enabled for 100Mb/s. Yep. Turn off auto,
force it to 100Mbs - do the same on the computer end. Links up at
100Mb/s, Yay!
Go back, look at the transfer speed. It's gone DOWN? How is that
even possible? Oh, yeah the fact that the thing is throwing errors at
100Mbs. Swap cables. Swap Ports. Still no go. Finally grab the
end of the cable which is plugged into the 250GS and plug it into a
spare port on the RB850Gx2 and it works. 100Mb/s, auto negotiate,
transfer speeds of 10Mb/s between the computers. Things transfer just
fine.
And then... as a final straw, I get a response to a trouble ticket
from a customer complaining that they can't get a link with a RB493AH
running latish code on any port. No matter what the setting for
negotiation is.
Why is this even close to acceptable for a manufacturer who should be
able to catch this stuff?
-forrest
