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Forum Discussion
Spanning Tree problem with Orbi RBR50
I have been having network problems with my Orbi system for a few months now.. The symptoms are similar to issues others have reported, where satellites and other devices gradually disappear from th...
plemans wrote:have you tried plugging the hub into one of the switches to see if it makes an impact?
I only discovered this late last night so my wife and I are currently enjoying having a stable network for a little while! I'll certainly try that experiment when it's not likely to cause an outage (and outrage).
plemans wrote:And the problem doesn't happen at all if the hub hasn't been plugged in?
Correct ... I have no problems if I leave that hub disconnected or powered off. (I have even brought up the RBS50 on the wired backhaul and it appears 100% stable.)
Even more conclusively, when all the devices on the wired network have gone away, I can unplug that port of the RBR50 and after a little while the wired devices start reappearing. I left the network in a broken state last night, but unplugged the USB-C hub (on a whim) and by morning everything had come back.
I suspect that what's happening is that the rogue port is somehow 'reflecting' packets it receives and making the router think that various MAC addresses on the wired network are downstream of that port - STP decides there is a loop and starts turning off other parts of the network. With the port disconnected, STP timeouts fire and it eventaully rediscovers the topology.
plemans wrote:I've found the more complex you make a network, the more challenging it is to troubleshoot.
Too right... (and I have a PhD in computer science)
It's also kinda hard to debug problems like this when all the instructions are on the internet! ;-)
pbarham wrote:
plemans wrote:have you tried plugging the hub into one of the switches to see if it makes an impact?
Just in case other people reading this get the wrong idea, I should probably make it clear that the 'hub' we're referring to isn't an ethernet hub, but a USB-C hub that happens to have a builtin 1Gbe ethernet adapter.
It really shouldn't have the RJ45 port enabled when the usb isn't connected to a host, but it's a powered USB hub and the lights come on as soon as you attach power. The packet activity light on the hub's RJ45 port was blinking even without an attached laptop.
The root cause might be that when a laptop is disconnected, the ethernet adaptor is left running (I've opened a support ticket with Aukey).
But... I don't fully understand why that should have a knock-on effect on the rest of my wired network.
You're right that I should probably try an experiment plugging the USB-hub into one of the other switches on my network- but they are all in different rooms (the cable moderm and Orbi router are the only things in my home office - so using it as a handy ethernet switch seemed convenient!)
I'll look around and see if I have a spared ethernet switch in my networking parts bin and see if the problem requires direct connection to the RBR50. (note- I mainly posted here because so many other people appear to have 'disappearing devices' problems and the firmware revision notes for V2.5.1.16 explicitly mention fixing this)