Connection drops after new Netgear Switch: how to debug this?

[vmachiel]

Hi,

I'm having issues where a wired device keeps cutting out every 5 minutes or so. And only for a like.. 5 seconds. Enough to be annoying, and when I turn on a VPN, it keeps telling my I'm not connected to the internet. (After that I auto reconnects after the couple of seconds have passed). I'll try to give all the necessary details.

So I have a Asus RT-BE86U router connected to a switch. The problems started when I upgraded the switch to a 2.5 Gbit one.

So the old setup was router (with various wifi connected devices or course) to the Netgear gs308 switch. In that switch were my Mac Mini (with a 10 Gbit port), a synology Nas (1 Gbit), a raspberry pi (1 Gbit), an Apple Tv (1 Gbit) and another router (RT-AX86U, 2.5 Gbit) for a Mesh connection with wired backhaul.

To make better use of 10 and 2.5 Gbit ports and to be future proof I upgraded the switch to a MS308. The manual said I could mix and match different ethernet speeds (100, 1Gbit, 2.5 Gbit). But now I have these issues.

Is there anything you can think off that could be causing this? Anything I should look into? Or.. did I just get a bad unit?

Thanks a bunch, hopefully the English is ok!

 

[degrub]

Try replacing the ethernet cable with a known good cable. CAT6 should be fine.
You can also try moving your existing cable to another lan port on the switch.

Did you list the old switch model number in place of the new one above ? They are both the same gigabit switch model number.

 

[vmachiel]

Try replacing the ethernet cable with a known good cable. CAT6 should be fine.
You can also try moving your existing cable to another lan port on the switch.

Hmm the cable was good with the old switch. But I'll try a different port.

 

[degrub]

Did you list the old switch model number in place of the new one above ? They are both the same gigabit switch model number.

 

[vmachiel]

Did you list the old switch model number in place of the new one above ? They are both the same gigabit switch model number.

yeah, its the MS308 sorry

I edited the post

 

[degrub]

Does the speed indication light on the port(s) on the ASUS or the switch that your cable is plugged into go out or change color when the outage occurs ?
Unplug everything else on the switch while looking.

I would suspect the Mac Mini 10Gbit port as i don't believe it supports 2.5Gbit.

 

[vmachiel]

Does the speed indication light on the port(s) on the ASUS or the switch that your cable is plugged into go out or change color when the outage occurs ?
Unplug everything else on the switch while looking.

I would suspect the Mac Mini 10Gbit port as i don't believe it supports 2.5Gbit.

Good idea I’ll check when I’m back home.

When I set it up, both lights where on indicating 2.5 Gbit. And the Mac does support it according to https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/specs/

But maybe one light will go off when the outage occurs…

 

[degrub]

Is the issue showing up only from the Mac Mini or is it all devices going through the new switch ?

There are plenty of reports out on Reddit and MacRumors about having to manually set the link rate to 2.5Gb/s in the mini. Also, some bad RJ45 ports, but those can occur on any device / cable.

One example from MacRumors
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• Sep 13, 2023

• #190

Don't see this issue on my M2 Ultra. Using all the default settings and my 10 GbE networking has no problems.

There are a couple of possibilities. First, 2.5Gbps networks are rather rare compared to 1Gbps and 10Gbps networks. Yours may work fine because it isn’t a 2.5Gbps network. My fix was to manually set network speed to 2.5Gbps.

The other possibility is that it doesn’t always happen. I had this problem on my Mac mini M2 Pro and had to do the manual setting. When I first set up my M2 Ultra Mac Studio, the network seemed to work fine on Auto. About a month into having the new machine, it started acting up out of the blue one night. I asked around to see if anyone else was having network problems thinking it was my network and not my machine. When everyone told me their network access was fine, I remembered the Mac mini and set the manual configuration. The problem went away. I haven’t restored the setting to Auto since then.
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