POE switch troubleshooting

[Lucian]

I have a POE switch connected to 6 outdoor cams. I was going to add a new camera so I used an additional POE injector to set up the camera indoors. I connected the new IP cam to the router re no problems. However, all of the other cameras died and could not see any cams on the network.

I rebooted the router and POE switch but still see nothing. I checked the external camera cabling with one of the cheap POE detectors and get flashing green.

We did have storm but I checked the outside cameras and didn't see any obvious water filtration. I brought in one of the cameras and it seemed to light up with injector.

Questions:

1) How can I tell if the POE switch is bad ?
2) Is there a cable tester that would help determine if there is a short, etc. on one the leads?

Thanks

 

[Robert hocevar]

You can get a cheap cat cable tester on amazon for about 10 bucks that will tell you if you have a open, short, miswire.
Or you can take the camera and plug it into the switch with a short patch cable and see if the camera will fire up.
also try to plug one of the other cameras into that port and see if it works.
It is not uncommon for a port to go back. especially on the less expensive switches found on ebay or nelly's

 

[Lucian]

You can get a cheap cat cable tester on amazon for about 10 bucks that will tell you if you have a open, short, miswire.
Or you can take the camera and plug it into the switch with a short patch cable and see if the camera will fire up.
also try to plug one of the other cameras into that port and see if it works.
It is not uncommon for a port to go back. especially on the less expensive switches found on ebay or nelly's

Thank you. I took one of the cameras and connected directly to the router with a POE injector and it fired up. It was strange since ALL of the cameras are out despite the fact the switch lights up. I think I will replace the switch and see what happens. I tried using a camera which is only connected to the switch via a patch cable indoors ( in the basement) and disconnected ALL outdoor cameras. I used the cheap POE detector and it does show power but I think you need only 2 of the wires to be intact to have the flashing green light.

 

[TVille]

Have you tried one camera one the switch? Maybe it is overloaded.

 

[Lucian]

Have you tried one camera one the switch? Maybe it is overloaded.

thanks 24 Port POE Network Switch W/ 2 Gigabit Uplink Ports | Designed for IP Cameras | POE+ Capable of Pushing 30 Watts per Port | 250 Watts Total Budget I only have 5 cams. but I rebooted again and one cam only and that works. I will add one at a time to see what happened. It just seems strange that when I connected an additional IP cam to the network via power injector all the others went out.

 

[SpacemanSpiff]

I have a POE switch connected to 6 outdoor cams. I was going to add a new camera so I used an additional POE injector to set up the camera indoors. I connected the new IP cam to the router re no problems. However, all of the other cameras died and could not see any cams on the network.
...

Did you lose connectivity to the PoE switch with 6 cams when you connected a new cam to the router, or did the outage occur when you connected the new cam to the PoE switch itself? If it is the former, consider trying the following: disconnect the uplink between the PoE switch and the router, then connect a computer to the PoE switch and try accessing any of the attached cameras.

 

[Teken]

I don’t know what you mean by all going out.

But something to consider is a IP conflict which has been known to take down dozens of home networks a day!

If you’re using Static IP addresses following a good working network schema & documentation is paramount.

Better yet, all network appliances should be reserved an IP address based on their MAC addresses. Doing so will avoid IP conflicts while ensuring network changes are propagated correctly.

Lastly, what kind of Injector is this can you show us a picture with the specifications?

 

[Lucian]

I don’t know what you mean by all going out.

But something to consider is a IP conflict which has been known to take down dozens of home networks a day!

If you’re using Static IP addresses following a good working network schema & documentation is paramount.

Better yet, all network appliances should be reserved an IP address based on their MAC addresses. Doing so will avoid IP conflicts while ensuring network changes are propagated correctly.

Lastly, what kind of Injector is this can you show us a picture with the specifications?

Thank you. I assigned a static IP address to all the cameras. Otherwise, the router will assign IP addresses to new devices. I rebooted the main POE switch twice and now all of the 5 other cameras are back on line. I removed the tp link injector.

I have used this injector before as I like to set up my POE cameras indoors ( especially the dahua cameras) and have never had this happen. I think you are probably right about the IP conflict- I never thought about that. Since the POE switch had power (at least as measured by the 10$) POE detector, I think the IP conflict makes the most sense. SO I will go ahead and reserve the IP address for all other items.

I was having a lot of problems with zoom dropouts and VERIZON internet drops so I broke down and bought the verizon wifi 6 router and they finally were able to address the issue. The downside is that the FIOS routers don't give you a lot of flexibility like VLAN, etc. . The G3100 only lets you reserve 10 IP addresses. I was waiting to ensure the network was stable before making too many changes. Thank you so much. All seems to working now.

Thanks again to everyone.