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Forum Discussion
How to connect 2x Netgear M4100 D12G over fibre?
Hi, I'm in need of some assistance please if someone could kindly help. My company recently purchased six MG4100-D12G managed switches with the intention of creating a local network between two rooms at three different locations.
Two of the locations have an Excel cat6 patch panel between the two rooms, and this is what we have utilised with success for connectivity. My understanding is we have left the default settings on both switches, except for changing the configuration method to manual within the IPv4 Management VLAN configuration window on one of the switches, and also changed the gateway address on the same switch which has been changed to manual. So far this setup has worked and workstations between the two rooms can ping one another.
At the third and final location, there is Excel fibre patch panel between the two rooms. I have purchased two AGM731F
ProSafe Fibre 1000Base-SX GBIC Modules, one for each switch, and also purchased two Multimode Duplex 62.5/125 LC to LC Fibre patch cables to join the switches to their respective patch panels.
We've used the same IPv4 Management configuration as described above, however we cannot ping between the two rooms. I understand that I should be able to see (in a dark room) a laser or light from the GBIC Module / fibre patch cable, however nothing is visible. I'm also under the impression that the fibre ports of the MG4100-D12G auto detect, and do not need enabling?
We are extremely novice to this, so support may need to be in layman's terms as this is not our day job. Any support and assistance would be greatly appreciated.
2 Replies
Welcome to our community! :)
It seems that you are having issues connecting the switch using the GBIC modules. May I know if you were able to isolate the modules to another switch just to check if it is working? Please also check the port configuration if the GBIC module is up or down.
Regards,
John
NETGEAR Community Team
Many thanks for getting back to me.
I was on site yesterday and did a further bit of troubleshooting.
I have factory reset both switches, left the defualt configuration on one, and changed the configuration method to "manual" on the other and also changed its IP address to "169.254.100.200" rather than the "169.254.100.100". With the GBIC module connected I can now see a red light at the end of the cable which would go in the Fibre patch pannel, but only a red light on one side of the LC connector out of the two is visable, is this normal? This scenario is now the same on both switches (which I feel is progress compared to last time).
I have also brought both switches into the same room and connected them together via Cat5, and can successfully ping between the two switches under this setup. Its only when returning to the fibre cable arrangement where difficulty is being experienced.
The GBIC ports have no LED's to indicate activity, and upon further inspection is seems the ports are shared with ethernet ports 11 and 12, with 11F and 12F respectivley? Having done some research I understand having cat5 cables in the shared ethernet ports can cause issues, so I can confirm that in either switch, no ethernet cables are connected to ports 11 or 12.
I also retrieved a spare (unboxed) M4100 D12G switch yesterday and ran through the same configuration as described above, with the same result.
Regarding how to check if the ports are up / down / active, I am uncertain on how to do this. There appears to be a "monitoring" section within the interface which lists the 12 ports and LAG ports (not sure what this is). I do not see ports 11F or 12F listed, but assume if shared with ports 11 and 12 that any activity would be shown against these? I can see that ports where cat5 cables are connected appear to be recieving packets indicating their active, however ports 11 or 12 show no activity. Am I looking in the right place?
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