As many of you have heard, I've had a bit of a irritation for quite some time about Mikrotik's seeming inability to consistently wire their Ethernet ports correctly for 10mb/s operation - specifically paying attention to the correct *polarity* of the wires in the Ethernet pairs. This wreaks havoc with devices which need the correct polarity to work, such as my SiteMonitor Base II's. For instance, every other switchport on the RB250GS Ethernet switch doesn't work. I don't remember if it's 1 3 and 5 which doesn't work, or if it's 2 and 4, but it is definitely every other one. Swapping the wires in one of the pairs fixes the problem, so I'm sure that's the cause.
I've tried over the years to get MikroTik to care enough to even acknowledge the issue. Of course, the problem isn't their lack of compliance with the standard, but instead it must be my problem instead, so I've resolved to just dealing with the occasional need to train a customer to try a different port. I should note that as far as I can tell, this isn't a common problem with other switch vendors. In fact, I don't think I have a single non-MikroTik device in my possession which doesn't work with the standard-complying 10Mb/s Ethernet port in the base unit - and I have quite a variety that I've tried. Not sure how MikroTik is so good at getting this not-very-consistently wrong, and everyone else seems to almost always get it right. But, that's not really my rant. It just provides the background. Over the last year or so I've slowly put together the internal network at home and at PacketFlux out of MikroTik devices. Quite frankly, they have a feature set I appreciate, and I can generally overlook the issues, but they're starting to get on my nerves, the most recent ones being: * Routerboard 850Gx2 doesn't show master/slave configuration options in webfig (ok this one is minor). * That same routerboard 850Gx2, won't link with a 10Mb/s device at all unless you turn *off* autonegotiation and hard code it 10Mbs. Well, except when you try to replicate it later, in which case it works fine with autonegotiation on. Fine, be that way. Well, until hours later it decides to not link with that exact same 10Mb/s device and you have to set it back to not negotiate. Fortunately, hardcoding the speed seems to always work so I'm leaving it that way. * Disabling advertising speeds seems to be generally non-functional on some devices. Want to negotiate at only 10/100, so turn off 1000M checkboxes? Fine, except the damn thing still autonegotiates at 1000M. And what really set me off this weekend: Remember that RB250GS? Well, I recently upgraded my main development/desktop computer (much faster now, thanks), but am still moving things off my old one. So I want it up to be able to VNC into it. In addition, I have a newly installed Linux machine here as well. The physical hardware for both of these devices are Dell workstations from about the same time period. They both have 10/100 Ethernet cards which have been autonegotiating at 100Mb/s with when plugged into a rb2011 (which has it's own unique issues as well). So this weekend, I decide to move these things off the top of the r&d bench to under it. I decide to install that RB250GS under the bench as well to plug them into and give me a couple more spare ports, and so I get it plugged in and linked up to another MikroTik (amazingly this link works just fine), and then hook both dell machines (The Win7 one and the Linux one) to the RB250GS. A few hours later, I copy some stuff from the old Win7 box to my new one. Many gigs of stuff to be specific - something like 40GB or thereabouts. Windows is nicely telling me that it's going to take 'more than a day' and that I'm only transferring at 1MB/s (yeah 10Mb/s). WTF? So I get digging. The (@#*$ 250GS is only linking at 10Mb/s. Check the other machine: 10Mb/s also. Fine. Negotiation issue. Go in, make sure that the port is enabled for 100Mb/s. Yep. Turn off auto, force it to 100Mbs - do the same on the computer end. Links up at 100Mb/s, Yay! Go back, look at the transfer speed. It's gone DOWN? How is that even possible? Oh, yeah the fact that the thing is throwing errors at 100Mbs. Swap cables. Swap Ports. Still no go. Finally grab the end of the cable which is plugged into the 250GS and plug it into a spare port on the RB850Gx2 and it works. 100Mb/s, auto negotiate, transfer speeds of 10Mb/s between the computers. Things transfer just fine. And then... as a final straw, I get a response to a trouble ticket from a customer complaining that they can't get a link with a RB493AH running latish code on any port. No matter what the setting for negotiation is. Why is this even close to acceptable for a manufacturer who should be able to catch this stuff? -forrest
