Hi,

I have a few of these PoE adapters in my house extending the network and providing wired connectivity for access points back to my router/firewall. I have been experiencing an issue which I believe I have traced back to how these dual port EoP devices handle the moving of a MAC address between their ports.

I have two access points, each connected to a seperate port on the same EoP adapter. This design has specific requirements for my network so I am not looking to redesign this approach. What I have noticed is that when my laptop switches between these two access points it loses some LAN connectivity. For example, it can no longer ping the default gateway on the new network even though I can see from a debug on my firewall the ICMP pings are reaching the firewall and replies are being sent.

I have set up some SPAN/monitor ports on a switch to troubleshoot this is in detail and found that the ICMP pings and their replies are seen on the EoP adapter next to the firewall (i.e. the ping makes is across the EoP network and the reply is sent back on to the EoP network). Another SPAN however shows that this ping reply does not make it back to the access point the laptop is now connected to.

Now here is where I become sure it is due to how the EoP adapter handles the move of a MAC address. If I connect to the first access point and everything is working and then connect the laptop to the second access point and being pinging, those pings fail until such time that I physically disconnect the first access point from the EoP adapter, forcing the EoP adapter to 'unlearn' the MAC address on that port and send the replies to the second access port. Everything then starts working.

So, normally with a switched device (as opposed to a hub) which this seems to be, the device should learn when a MAC address moves to a different port on the device and update the MAC address table to send traffic to the host off the new port. This does not seem to be happening with these devices unless the interface the MAC address was first learnt on goes down. There is probably a timeout of some form happening as I have noticed during testing that sometimes things just started working but it was some time after the laptop had moved to the second port so the EoP adapter does not seem to be updating its MAC table when the device moves from one port to another.

Can someonone at TP-Link advise how this issue could be addressed.

Thanks