Painful T4 in-wall installations / Netgear PoE problems?

[timbooo]

I've been having a hell of a time recently with two shipments of the "new batch" T4 in-walls. Essentially they just do not power up over PoE, although it's been frustratingly difficult to figure out why. Initially it led me to RMA'ing two units as DOA, but then when I went back to our office and tried them before packing up they immediately worked (sod's law in full effect) and also RMA'ing a mid-box while on the line with tech support as it clearly appeared that multiple fronts would work on midbox A but not midbox B, then again in our office midbox B fired up any front clipped onto it without fuss.

The switches I tend to use are Netgear Prosafe GS108PP / GS116PP because they're moderately priced, dumb (as in not smart/managed), and rackmountable. They have never caused me any fuss in the past, including with a batch of first generation T4s (before the new screens and the chip shortages). They power WAPs, DS2s, EA1s all over the place, no issues previously with anything.

The pain I'm having with the T4 in-walls is that they don't power up. Generally speaking the PoE indicator on the switch lights up but it only lights orange ("PoE fault") rather than turning green and then data starting to flow. I then change the front panel, or change the midbox, or take it out of the wall, or change cable, or change the alignment with the moon. After several iterations of "fiddle farting", quite often the panel starts to work. If I talk to tech support about it seemingly working, it quite often fails. If I start to talk to them about it being definitely dead, it quite often starts working.

At our office, we have the world's crappiest little 5 port Tenda PoE (non-plus) switch. It works every damn time, every damn screen, every damn midbox.

I tried to suggest to tech support that they might get themselves a GS108PP and try out some screens but they told me I would have to send them one. Yeah, sure...

 

They also tell me no-one has called in with any similar issues, so I'm appealing to the wider world to see if I'm honestly alone in this. Maybe you all use mega-spensive switches and laugh at my puny Netgears, time will tell.

What could it be, I'm no expert but I assume there is some kind of clever handshaking that goes on to detect PoE requirements and determine the level of power output needed. Could it be that the circuitry on the T4 midbox has a bit of a problem with the circuitry in the Netgear?

 

I've torn my hair out enough, I'll 'switch' to a different brand of PoE for the time being and hopefully my problems will go away.

[South Africa C4 user]

Sounds like you need to buy the crappiest little Tenda POE switches that you can find and use them at home? 

Sorry - could not resist!

[Andrew luecke]

Honestly, in the past we came across all kinds of bugs with the cheap Netgear stuff on the networking side of things (I think it was the gs108 and gs105 series back then). Even many smart Netgear switches in the past had a super laggy interface. Surprisingly, other cheap brands didn't have as many issues (in particular, cheap rack mounted TP-Link gear we found was surprisingly good).

Everyone should be using managed switches though. Managed switches are generally built to a better standard and when something goes wrong with a managed switch you have logs available to help diagnose the issue, and firmware upgrades can also be applied to rectify many issues. A lot of the money spent with unmanaged switches we found was later lost due to time wasted when issues occurred. In fact, often when an issue occurred, we often ended up telling customers to upgrade anyway (for STP and Rogue DHCP protection) and it generally fixed the issue instantly instead of forcing us to unplug cable by cable until we found something in the rack and every edge location

That being said, I believe that Poe itself uses resistance to detect if it's Poe. Test with a different switch, but also test the fitoff and do a cable test to ensure all pins are correct (or bring the ts locally and test with 2 different cables, we have come across dodgy patch leads before where the pins were too deep

 

 

[Andrew luecke]

Also, , I may be wrong, but I do recall many of the Netgear cheap products were also on the do not use networking list. 

[Kyle Coolabode]

This is correct. Netgear is extensively in the Do Not Use list. Get yourself a PoE switch that plays nice with C4 and you should be good. Can't go wrong with Araknis.

[RAV]

You might try a POE injector and rule out the touchpanels as the fault.

[eggzlot]

I always had good success with these injectors:

https://shop.poetexas.com/collections/injectors

[lippavisual]

They are cheap for a reason.  For a few devices just use injectors if you don’t want to shell out the money for a good switch. 

[timbooo]

Appreciate the responses, and I kinda expected the overall tone and I understand it. However I have used a great number of these switches in the past, with a great many different devices including Draytek, Pakedge, Ruckus, Netgear APs, Control4 EA1 (PoE) controllers, Crestron touch panels, Control4 T3 and even early T4 touch panels, Hikvision/Reolink/Pakedge PoE CCTV cameras. Never a single issue with anything at all.

As I said we had some T4s from the early batch (with the shonky screens - one of them is showing all kinds of whacky ghosting already) and even those didn't give any grief. Powered up first time every time. And now half a dozen of the new wave T4 touch panels arrive and they have all exhibited issues. I understand blaming the switch because it's not particularly high end, but it seems to me that it is the T4 which is doing something wrong/different here.

PS I have of course tried different cables, different midboxes, in the wall, out of the wall, single device on the switch, fully loaded switch. It's almost random whether it works or not.

 

I just feel like there's something up with the new T4s. But it looks like I'm alone in the combination I'm using, and Control4 tech support weren't interested in investigating it, so I suppose I'll have to switch (ahhh, terrible pun work).

[Thepritch88]

I'm having the same issue, have a project that is using an araknis 210 switch which supposedly has full poe on all ports. Project has around 10 original T4s that have been installed and working for over a year. received 4 new screens last week for the same project and none of them powered up first time, I eventually got two working but could not get the other two working, RMA'd two and the tech said they had received quite a few reports of similar issues. While waiting for the replacements one of the new ones that I managed to get working failed and when I received the two replacements they had the same issue so I'm about to RMA another three, I think its an issue with midbox because the new screens all work fine on the old midboxes but the old screens  and the new screens don't work on the new midboxes.

[Thepritch88]

can I ask where your located? hopefully this is just an issue with one dodgy batch sent to the UK 

[LollerAgent]

3 hours ago, Thepritch88 said:

I'm having the same issue, have a project that is using an araknis 210 switch which supposedly has full poe on all ports. Project has around 10 original T4s that have been installed and working for over a year. received 4 new screens last week for the same project and none of them powered up first time, I eventually got two working but could not get the other two working, RMA'd two and the tech said they had received quite a few reports of similar issues. While waiting for the replacements one of the new ones that I managed to get working failed and when I received the two replacements they had the same issue so I'm about to RMA another three, I think its an issue with midbox because the new screens all work fine on the old midboxes but the old screens  and the new screens don't work on the new midboxes.

Are you sure you aren't exceeding the overall PoE power budget for your 210?  While every port technically supports 802.3at/af, each Araknis 210 model also has a maximum PoE power budget that you can not exceed over all ports.  If you do, you would see issues like you are describing.  

AN-210-SW-R-24-POE - 190W
AN-210-SW-R-16-POE - 130W
AN-210-SW-R-8-POE - 65W

The T4 uses ~13W peak (but likely less in most conditions).  With 14 T4's, at peak, that is ~185W.  This is dangerously close to the 190W budget for the 24 port model.

Edited March 8, 2022 by LollerAgent

[timbooo]

13 hours ago, Thepritch88 said:

I'm having the same issue, have a project that is using an araknis 210 switch which supposedly has full poe on all ports. Project has around 10 original T4s that have been installed and working for over a year. received 4 new screens last week for the same project and none of them powered up first time, I eventually got two working but could not get the other two working, RMA'd two and the tech said they had received quite a few reports of similar issues. While waiting for the replacements one of the new ones that I managed to get working failed and when I received the two replacements they had the same issue so I'm about to RMA another three, I think its an issue with midbox because the new screens all work fine on the old midboxes but the old screens  and the new screens don't work on the new midboxes.

Oh thank god I'm not just going insane, or at least I'm not going insane alone.

I started thinking it might be the alignment of the pins, because some of them looked like the PCB was off centre. But I've convinced myself that was another false diagnosis.

I'm now more suspicious than before that there's something up with the PoE circuitry in the midboxes of these new ones, or as you said hopefully just one run of them.

 

It's a bit annoying that UK tech support (yes I am also in the UK) told me there were no similar reports on both occasions I called about this (about a week apart).

[Thepritch88]

On 3/8/2022 at 2:21 PM, LollerAgent said:

Are you sure you aren't exceeding the overall PoE power budget for your 210?  While every port technically supports 802.3at/af, each Araknis 210 model also has a maximum PoE power budget that you can not exceed over all ports.  If you do, you would see issues like you are describing.  

AN-210-SW-R-24-POE - 190W
AN-210-SW-R-16-POE - 130W
AN-210-SW-R-8-POE - 65W

The T4 uses ~13W peak (but likely less in most conditions).  With 14 T4's, at peak, that is ~185W.  This is dangerously close to the 190W budget for the 24 port model.

Appreciate you trying to help but that was the first thing I thought to check. You forgot to mention the 48 port model which has overall budget of 375W. On OVRC it say the switch is using 23% of POE power.

[ekohn00]

On 3/8/2022 at 7:08 PM, timbooo said:

Oh thank god I'm not just going insane, or at least I'm not going insane alone.

 

Hate to ask, but when connecting the T4 to the switch is it in the wall? Have you tried using a known good short ethernet cable and go over to the switch and trying several of the POE ports?

[timbooo]

3 minutes ago, ekohn00 said:

Hate to ask, but when connecting the T4 to the switch is it in the wall? Have you tried using a known good short ethernet cable and go over to the switch and trying several of the POE ports?

I think I can safely speak for my fellow complainant and say yes of course. In the wall, out the wall, different cable runs, at the switch, different patch leads, and so on et cetera....

[ekohn00]

56 minutes ago, timbooo said:

I think I can safely speak for my fellow complainant and say yes of course. In the wall, out the wall, different cable runs, at the switch, different patch leads, and so on et cetera....

well that sums it up....  Sorry, had to ask - hate to say how many time I've seen the smartest people forget to check the simplest thing.

simply since you have ONLY the T4 on the switch and all other ports are disconnected, and it won't boot no matter what port....and you know the T4 works, it's obviously a bad switch - reason unknown.

 

[timbooo]

On 3/8/2022 at 10:49 AM, Thepritch88 said:

can I ask where your located? hopefully this is just an issue with one dodgy batch sent to the UK 

Firstly to re-confirm yes I am in the UK.

I wondered if you've had any progess with c4 support or made any breakthroughs of your own regarding the problem (90% sure it's with the midboxes/powerboxes whatever they're called now).

Once again I find myself with 3 pairs of midbox / screen. Seemingly one midbox is perfect, it powers up all three screens every (touch wood) time. The other two appear to be crap. And yet this morning when I connect those other two up to the switch they immediately worked as if it was all in my head. Unplug them, install in wall, connect, nothing. Uninstall from wall, return to the switch at the rack, connect directly again (as per the morning), not working. It's almost as if they need a rest before they'll work, and yet sometimes it seems like the opposite - if I fire one up in a good box and leave it a while, then move it to a "bad box" it might suddenly work.

The biggest problem is of course this is completely unreliable, any power outage and they could well all not turn back on. Worst part is these panels I have now are already replacements under RMA, so if it is a batch problem it must be a big batch.

[Thepritch88]

There is also a post on the tech community pages about this issue at the moment with a few people with the same issue, not sure where they are located though, its definitely a known issue but tech support don't know whats causing it yet.

doing investigation with tech yesterday and we discovered the touchscreens I have wont boot up on an Araknis switch or a cisco switch, I was asked to try poe injector the only one i had with me did poe and poe+ and still none of the screens worked. Tech told me that all the units they have received back with this issue would work when plugged into a pakedge SX switch or a "dumb" poe injector so I should try that. I took them home and tried them on a really cheap 48V POE injector and all three worked straight away. it seems to be an issue with the poe negotiation between the midboxes and certain brands of switches/poe injectors. I was told to keep hold of my faulty units for the moment while they figure out where exactly the issue is and what the fix will be, fingers crossed that doesn't take too long.

[timbooo]

2 hours ago, Thepritch88 said:

There is also a post on the tech community pages about this issue at the moment with a few people with the same issue, not sure where they are located though, its definitely a known issue but tech support don't know whats causing it yet.

doing investigation with tech yesterday and we discovered the touchscreens I have wont boot up on an Araknis switch or a cisco switch, I was asked to try poe injector the only one i had with me did poe and poe+ and still none of the screens worked. Tech told me that all the units they have received back with this issue would work when plugged into a pakedge SX switch or a "dumb" poe injector so I should try that. I took them home and tried them on a really cheap 48V POE injector and all three worked straight away. it seems to be an issue with the poe negotiation between the midboxes and certain brands of switches/poe injectors. I was told to keep hold of my faulty units for the moment while they figure out where exactly the issue is and what the fix will be, fingers crossed that doesn't take too long.

I've come to the same conclusion regarding the PoE "handshaking" process, despite not really knowing anything about it. The cheapest crappiest switch I have, a 10/100 Tenda PoE (not PoE+) £25 Amazon special, works every damn time. I'm buying a few of them just to get my sites up and running, might try some old TPLink stuff I've got hanging around in a drawer too. I always try to err on the side of basic/simple, but this is below even my usual waterline.

I reckon the only fix will be new midboxes because I sense they put them out to a new supplier when the "gen2" T4s came along and the new supplier is clearly guff.

It's nice to be vindicated in some way, instead of just being told I'm doing it wrong or it's my fault for not spunking more money on unnecessarily expensive kit.

 

I'm so glad you posted, I was going absolutely loopy over this, thank you so much!