@David-TP 

 

Yes - that network diagram is accurate WHEN I was trying to do the wired backhaul option. The only clarification is that the hardwired PC (shown as laptop in your test) is is behind a second switch (opposite end of house from the main switch the deco is plugged into) - I'll refer to the switch with the hardwired PC as "switch2" - its another Netgear JGS524E (the v2 model). 

 

...to answer your questions:

 

As for the "same issue resulted", do you mean all three XE5300s turned red and offline on the APP?   yes, they would cycle from red to yellow to green then back to red (VERY slowly, but I could never get it stabilized when there was a wired backhaul connection between two of the decos.

 

How about the laptop at this moment? still unable to ping the gateway? yes, pings to gateway were only very intermittently able to get a response (ie, 1 out of every 10-15 attempts)

 

If unplugging the remote wired XE5300 this time, will the rest 2*XE5300s be back to green and online?   Once the wired backhaul connection was removed, all three decos (and the remaining wired network) would return back to normal state within 5-10 seconds. 

 

By the way, were you able to reproduce this issue most of the time?   I could repro this 100% of the time

 

...and for the next troubleshooting step:

 

As a reference (for any speedtests below) - my main internet connection is gigabit fiber, with a secondary cable modem connection (setup as failover in firewalla).

• A wired speedtest normally gets 600-900mbit/sec downstream.
• A wireless speedtest from a phone standing feet from main deco results in similar speeds.
• A wireless speedtest from deco3 normally gets ~90-100mbit (it's going from the deco3 to deco2 with a "fair connection" over wifi6E backhaul, then again from deco2 to main deco over wifi6E backhaul)

 

 

I WAS able to move the main deco over to a second lan port directly on the firewalla gold - took about 10 seconds for wifi (via decos) to regain connectivity, but then everything appeared to be operating normally.  I did a few pings across the network and a speedtest from a phone on the "most distant" deco (2 deco units away from the main deco), with "ok" results with about 90mbit downstream.

 

With the environment in this state (main deco wired directly into firewalla gold, +2 decos wireless backhaul) I started a constant ping from a wired PC (on switch2) to both the firewalla gold and to the main deco.    Ping times to both of these were a constant 1ms in this state.

 

I tried adding a wired backhaul connection to that "most distant" deco (deco3) - going only thru an ethernet patch panel to a cable directly connected to the main deco.    As soon as I added the wired connection, there was a brief (3-5 second) interruption in networking - pings to both the firewalla and main deco failed during that time.   However, they did resume after 5 seconds -- oddly pings to the gateway were in the 4-8ms range and pings to the main deco were in the 4-25ms range.   The deco app on my phone still showed the deco3 with a wireless connection to deco2 with a "Fair" signal - which seemed odd as I thought it might show a different status once it was using wired backhaul (which I assumed it was at this point).   Does the deco app on phone show some type of indicator for a deco using wired backhaul?   

 

The increase in latency/ping times seemed odd, but the network seemed stable and working (which was better than my prior attempt at wired backhaul).

 

At this point, I tried a quick test - running a speedtest from a phone connected to deco3 resulted in similar speeds as before (~90mbit) - which makes me think deco3 was NOT using wired backhaul at that point.   Of greater concern --- while the speedtest was running, pings (again, from wired PC) to both the main deco and to the firewalla increased to  >100ms, with some pings to deco main being dropped entirely.      I did this twice and there was a definite correlation between the speedtest running and high ping times and packet loss on what should be the wired network (PC to firewalla).

 

These results baffled me as (based on what I saw with the latency of the pings) they lead me to believe that somehow traffic that should remain on wired network (the pings from the wired PC) are somehow being forced over the wireless (deco) network, but only while the wired backhaul connection is in place.    I think there is still some type of a network loop in place.

 

When I removed the "wired backhaul" connection from deco3, the same pings went nonresponsive for about 10-12 seconds, but then the network came back with <1ms pings to both devices.      Running the same speedtest (from phone connected to deco3) had no impact on ping times (still 1ms throughout speedtest).

 

I have two other troubleshooting steps I'll try next time I have ability to test (ie, when the rest of my family isn't home) :

 

1. Replacing the "main switch" being used (the Netgear JGS524E) with a Cisco SG-200-18 switch I have elsewhere in my network.       

2. Moving the 3 node deco infrastructure over to a different cable modem/router - this will eliminate ALL switches and the firewalla gold from the environment with the deco.

 

 

  @dbonds 

 

I also purchased the XE5300 3 pack and I have a similar network config with a Goole Fiber Jack > Ubiquiti EdgeMax Router > Netgear JGS516PE > XE5300 Main (AP Mode).  

 

I could not get the nodes to detect the ethernet backhaul if there was a switch between any of the nodes. 

 

They would only use the ethernet backhaul if they were directly connected to each other.

  @emo65170 Thanks for the input - my first attempt was via the netgear switch.  My attempt last Friday was with one of the remote decos connected back to the main deco via a direct cable with no switch, and still failed.   I'm going to try and isolate the main deco OFF the existing netgear switch on to a TP-Link TL-SG108 unmanaged switch and see if that helps before trying the other two steps I put in my last post.

 

 

Update: I tried again connecting all of the Deco nodes directly to the Netgear switch and the ethernet backhaul is now working as expected. I can even see in the Netgear Port Status screeen that the ports that the Decos are attached to are in Up status and link speed correctly listed as 1000M. SpeedTest is testing 380/484 with 4-8ms ping. So it appears to be working as expected. Since we have similar equipment, Netgear, TPLink, etc. If you want to compare settings to help troubleshoot, I'd be happy to do that. Regarding your question about whether the phone app shows an icon for ethernet back haul, yes, it does. It looks like a blue cable in the shape of a "2" with terminated ends. Good luck!

One more thing to try on your side. On the Port Statistics page on the Netgear Management page, System > Monitoring > Port Statistics, check if there are any CRC error packets reported; may indicate a bad connection or port starting to go bad.