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I'm new to both switches and powerline ethernet, so please treat this question as a layman's question.

In our office, we use a switch to increase the number of ethernet ports:

            [Modem]                
               |
       [Router (4 ports)]            Asus RT-N66U
               |
       [Switch (16 ports)]           NETGEAR GS116Ev2 Managed Switch
   |     |     |      |     |
  [PC1] [PC2] [PC3] [PC4] [PCn]      PC's, printers, etc.

Everything works great. We recently acquired the adjacent office, but due external circumstances, meant that we had to use powerline ethernet to connect up the second office to our switch.

We connected the powerline adapter (TP-Link TL-PA8030PKIT 3-Port Gigabit Passthrough Powerline Starter Kit) to the wall socket, and then to the switch, thus:

            [Modem]                
               |
       [Router (4 ports)]
               |
       [Switch (16 ports)]
   |     |     |      |     | 
  [PC1] [PC2] [PC3] [PC4] [PowerLine Adapter] ------ [PowerLine Adapter]
                                                              |
                                                        [PC5 Office 2]

This worked until one of the following happened:

  1. Powerline plug was powered off/on
  2. Switch was powered off/on

At that point, every single device on the network lost its network connection. Devices couldn't "find" the router, nor other devices on the network, nor the internet.

We then reconnected the powerline adapter to the router, bypassing the switch:

                        [Modem]                
                          |
                  [Router (4 ports)]
                  |               |
   [Switch (16 ports)]       [PowerLine Adapter] ---- [PowerLine Adapter]
 |     |     |      |                                           |
[PC1] [PC2] [PC3] [PC4]                                  [PC5 Office 2]

That has worked fine. The question is what this might be? I assumed that it might be a DNS issue, but the switch is supposed to be plug-and-play (not requiring configuration), and DHCP Mode was set to "Disable" in settings.

Can anyone offer any suggestions on what could have caused this?

Update

It appears the router itself (via the management interface) claims it is not connected to the internet, despite all other devices being plugged into it not have a problem.

I attach a screengrab of the interface, in case there's anything obvious set incorrectly:

enter image description here

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14
  • Did this happen multiple times? (It seems it may of due to the listed 'one of these happened'). If the Powerline adaptors are level 3 devices (i.e they have an IP) are you accidentally setting them up as a gateway or dhcp server when you haven't meant to?
    – djsmiley2kStaysInside
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 12:07
  • Interesting question. This happened three times, which forced me to reconfigure as per the final diagram. The adapters do not appear to have any interface for configuration. They have no IP address (at least according to the router); instead I see the IP of the device in the second room that connects via them - almost as if they are transparent on the network map.
    – EvilDr
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 12:11
  • Well that mean they are just layer two, the only other thing I can come up with is a bug in either the switch, or the Powerline adaptors that caused the mac-address table of the switch to believe that all connected interfaces were on whichever port the powerline adapters were connected to. This is partal;ly while you wouldn't normally use something like powerline in a business environment.
    – djsmiley2kStaysInside
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 12:14
  • as a powerline user - they're mostly transparent to your system. And that's mostly the topology I use, so... that's strange. almost feels like you created a routing loop somehow, but that shouldn't happen.
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 12:23
  • You mentioned your switch is managed. Are you able to pull any logs from it?
    – Burgi
    Commented Feb 12, 2018 at 12:34

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