Entire Network Will Go Down When Desktop Is Connected

Routers
1

Update

  • Noticed when I posted that 1.3v came out for the Route10, updated and power cycled all my Alta devices, the same issue still persists, with turning off my desktop immediately bringing up my network right away as a fix.
  • Plugged into my secondary LAN port on my desktop, 2.5GbE Realtek and that seems to be fine, with everything else connected. Maybe this is an issue with my 10GbE card, but not sure why it didn’t happen before.

Hello everyone,

I noticed this issue recently and I think I can reliably reproduce the issue now.

Issue

  • My entire network will go down once my desktop computer connects/downloads something from the internet.

Configuration

  • Route10 [1.3v] (SFP 10GbE RJ45 on SFP WAN2, SFP 10GbE RJ45 on SFP LAN)
  • ISP 3GbE
  • AP6 Pro [2.2f] (POE on Route10)
  • AP6 [2.2f] (POE on Route10)
  • S8-POE [2.1r] (LAN on Route10)
  • Desktop Computer (AQC113 10GbE LAN) is hardwired into the SFP 10G RJ45 LAN port on the Route10.

Observations

  • When I first setup my Alta eco-system in early January, all my devices worked perfectly. Issues started arising with the latest AP6 2.2f firmware update. Changelog seems unrelated to any issues that I am seeing; however, I have also noticed some of my Google Nest Displays have been disconnecting and reconnecting randomly, which didn’t happen before.
  • I can reliably bring down my network once my desktop computer is turned on. If my network is still functioning, I can usually bring down the network by downloading a large file through my desktop.
  • When I turn off my desktop computer, my entire network comes back up almost immediately.
  • Alternatively, if I disconnect my AP6, my entire network will come back up too. I still need to test if this brings my network up immediately, but the first time I experienced this, this did work and my desktop was functioning fine, alongside my entire network. When I did this path, I thought I’d just give my AP6 a break and a few days later, I plugged it back in and my network was fine, alongside my desktop. However, I am experiencing this again.

Happy to share more details, but was curious if anyone had any insights to what might be happening? As for temperatures, my Route10 operates below 40 degrees celsius and I do have some active cooling in my networking closet, where only the Route10 resides in.

Thanks!

3

What brand is your 10GbE adapter?

4

It’s a Marvell AQC113 Controller. The brand of card itself is probably generic as it’s inbuilt into the motherboard.

I’ve disabled my secondary Realtek 2.5GbE LAN port and reset my network settings in Windows and this seems to have the 10GbE card working correctly again. Running speed tests show expected values for me.

My guess is a combination of maybe some Windows Updates or conflicting IP assignment from the router, though DHCP is enabled. I think it’s safe to say now this most likely isn’t related to anything in the Alta Ecosystem and some strange underlying issue with a software conflict.

Will run of a few more experiments to try to have a concrete root cause, but I think I understand better on what is going on.

1 Like
5

Do you have the network syslogging anywhere?

6

I did not capture the network syslogging.

I did do more reading about this and I’ve seen others having either disconnects or conflicts with Marvel based AQC113 network cards. Under advanced configuration, it seems like manually assigning:

  • Speed & Duplex to 10Gbps Full Duplex. Default was Auto.
  • Energy Efficient Ethernet to Disabled. Default was Enabled.
  • Priority & VLAN to VLAN Enabled, since I do not have QoS. Default was Priority and VLAN Enabled.

With these settings, I haven’t seen any related issues since last posting. I’ve also re-enabled my secondary Realtek 2.5GbE LAN port. I know this isn’t a exact root cause, but it seems very likely that AQC113 has some issues and needs some fine tuning configuration, away from the default values to work correctly.