I have the router setup so that Ether1 is my WAN interface, Ether9 is my master-local, whith Ether2-Ether8 all set with Ether9 as the ‘master-port’. I’ve enabled DHCP server on Ether9, and have also created a ‘masquerade’ rule in /ip firewall nat.
I can surf the internet, and everything appears to be working fine. I have a WAN connection at 1mbps/512kbps. When I have my laptop connected to the LAN side of the router and do speed tests at testmy.net, I am able to max out the connection almost everytime.
When I connect a second laptop to one of the other LAN ports, and run a speed test, I am only able to get 200-300kbps download.
Something about the router does not like having more than one device connected. I repeated this test with a slightly different network configuration: I connected an unmanaged 5-port desktop switch to one of the LAN ports, plugged both laptops into the switch, and was able to max out my connection again.
I have determined that my one laptop is negotiating at 10Mbps Half-Duplex, the rest of my devices are 100Mbps Full Duplex. Is there an issue with running a mixture on the same LAN segment?
Another test I did was to take Ether2 off the master-port Ether9, and create another instance of DHCP-Server on Ether2. Connecting the laptops into the separate LANs and the issue goes away.
Is there a way to get them to play a little nicer together?
Yes we’ve tried new cables… it feels like we tried everything. The only thing that seems to work is put all the 10MB devices onto their own LAN segment, setting the interfaces tied to the segment to not be 100MB or Full-Duplex. This is really starting to look like an incompatibility between 100MB Full-Duplex, and 10MB Half-Duplex connecting to the same LAN.
Maybe someone else can test this and report their findings?