I may have found a way to solve the problems of wiring up an Orbi-system (in accesspoint mode) in combination with a green/managed switch. I will thoroughly explain you my problem and my possible solution that for now is working. It concerns connecting the Orbi up to itself, but somehow works. I am curious if my solution also works for other people, so I would be happy to hear back.
I have an Orbi-system consisting of a RBR50-router and two RBS50-satellites. In my previous house the satellites were connected wireless, something that is not possible in my current house. I live in the Netherlands and the houses here have concrete floors that are a real challenge for wifi-signals. Fortunately I wired up my whole house. So I connected the satellite upstairs via the wired method.
This really never seemed to work that well. There was a strong wifi-signal with a good speed. The satellite was for sure using the wired connection for the network traffic, something I verified with speedtests. A local speedtest with a laptop easily got me 400 Mbit/s. But the satellite never showed up correct in the webinterface of the RBR50. It didn’t show up as a wired connection and usually it said there was a poor connection and sometimes it showed that the 2,4GHz-band was used for the backhaul. A bigger problem was that it also didn’t show up in the firmware-upgrade part of the RBR50. Also if I changed something in the wireless settings, those changes were not followed by the RBS50. I had to disconnect the cable to the RBS50, and then make sure it got a wireless link to the RBR50 before the changes were applied to the RBS50.
It were in a nutshell the problems I read often concerning wired up Orbi-systems. The reason may be that the core switch of my network is a TP-Link TL-SG108e, a switch that is managed and green. The RBK50 is in accesspoint mode and therefore I tried once to connect it via a LAN-port instead of the WAN-port, but that didn’t work at all. The RBR50 then has no connection anymore.
Today I was thinking of a way to solve this problem. One way would be to patch up two cables to the RBR50 (one to wan and one to lan) so that via my patch panel I could make a direct connection between the RBR50 and the RBS50. That probably would work, but would mean a lot of hassle. So I desperately tried something out of the box that worked: I connected a network cable to a LAN-port of the RBR50 and connected that cable with the WAN-port of the RBR50. So it is connected to itself. The network cable coming from the TP-Link switch I connected to another LAN-port. And in about 30 seconds the RBS50 showed up wired in the webinterface of the Orbi and is also recognized by the firmware upgrade part.
My other RBS50 satellite was still connected wireless to the Orbi-router because that one was in reach for the wireless backhaul and in that way at least was connected right to the RBR50. But of course I prefer a wire, when possible. After I wired up the second satellite it caused a loop after which the loop prevention of my Netgear-switch disabled the port. I suppose the loop was caused because the traffic was also flowing over the wireless backhaul. I turned off the loop prevention of the switch after which the network froze for about half a minute and the interface of the switch was unreachable. After half a minute this stopped and the interface of the switch was reachable again. I turned on loop prevention again and no loop was detected anymore. After this the second RBS50 also showed up wired in the webinterface of the RBR50.
I suppose this solution also works if you put a dumb switch between the RBK50 and a Smart/green-switch, but I didn’t try this yet. It was my original plan, but at the moment the power supply of the only dumb switch I have seems to be misplaced. I hope to find this back soon to try it out, cause obviously the number one rule of network equipment is to not cause loops, but somehow it works… I get wireless speeds of 410 Mbit/s on both wired accesspoints. And obviously not all ports are equal in accesspoint mode anyway, because the RBR50 only gets a signal via the WAN labeled port. So I assume it is not a real loop for the Orbi itself.
Maybe this could also be a solution for other users who have problems with Orbi, accesspoint mode and wired up satellites. The lay-out of my network is as follows: Provider-modem – EdgeRouter X – TP-Link SG-108E. Some equipment including the RBR50 and one RBS-50 is via a patch panel directly connected to this first switch. For other equipment there is a Netgear GS908E connected to the TP-Link switch including the second RBS50.
