Troubleshooting NETGEAR's Powerline Products

j_s wrote:
It's not clear from your description exactly what you are doing but if you have two powerline adapters connected to the wired part of your network (ie the router) then you will be setting up a loop which can totally clag a network.

I have several wireless routers which were all connected via WDS (Wireless Distribution Service). To beef up the bandwidth, I attempted to connect each of the routers to a XAV5001. Now WDS knows to drop redundant links, using a spanning-tree-algorithm, but the XAV5001 totally fails when any two powerline adapters are connected together on the Ethernet side. When I was trying to debug this problem, I took all four XAV5001 that I had and put them on a power-squid, then connected them all to a gigabit switch (and in turn to my laptop) - that configuration is a complete disaster, as the NETGEAR powerline utility totally freaks out. Only when I disconnected all but one Ethernet port was I able to configure the names and Encryption keys.

When I turn off the WDS on the routers, everything works - but now if any of the XAV5001's fail, connectivity is lost - it sure would be better if the XAV5001's implemented a spanning tree algorithm to drop redundant links, so networks can be built with some redundancy to enhance reliability.

In my case, because WDS drops out redundant connections, my setup was working because when I first put it together, I powered up the powerline adapters and then started up the routers. That worked until the powerline adapters somehow glitched and the WDS picked up the slack, and then when the powerline adapters came back online with WDS connecting the Ethernet segments, the powerline adapters went south and made a debugging mess.