I recently acquired a RB532 and when I plugged my laptop into either of the Via NIC ports, the activity lights on the RB went crazy. The strange thing is that the activity light on the laptop NIC wasn't doing anything abnormal.

Possibly related, I couldn't ping the RB from the laptop, but I could ping the laptop from RB (with about 50% packet loss). Open firewall, known-good 10ft UTP cables (I tried both straight-through and crossover), and I tried both interface cable settings (long and short). Plugging into the Korina NIC worked as expected. I'm running RouterOS 2.9beta16. Ideas?

Sounds like the MDI/X checking is not working with the Eth on the laptop. We have sold thousands of RB44s with the VIA chip, and this is the first such MDI/X checking sounding problem. We might add an option to disable the MDI/X checking, but that will be on a new board design.

Also, it might just be an incompatibility between the Ethernets -- it happens.

John

I have also had this exact problem with VIA network cards before (seems to be a hardware issue - happened in all driver versions and OS types), though I haven't been able to find out any further information. The only solution is to connect it to a different type of NIC or switch.

On the next revision of the RB500, you will have the option to disable the MDI/X for the VIA Ethernet interfaces. For now, you should use the first interface which uses and ADMtek PHY and MDI/X can be disabled from 2.9.6? by going to interface ethernet menu in the CLI.

John