TLDR; Advanced IP Scanner causes havoc on moca network.
I bought a pair of MA2500C units and have them set up for testing with a short (<1m) RG6 and short cat6 patch cables. Everything worked great out of the box and linked right up and I had internet. I logged in and set up the admin password and set the remote unit to dhcp, saved and rebooted. I set my pc to dhcp and when the unit came back up, I had internet. Then I went to search for the remote adapter's ip address using advanced ip scanner and that's when the fun started. I launch the scan and half way through the scan posting results, the moca link drops completely and would not reestablish until I rebooted the remote device. I thought the link just hiccuped so I launched a speed test and youtube stream simultaneously and both worked great and I received full speeds through the moca link. I thought "ok, so it was just a hiccup, let's find the remote device" and launched the ip scan again. Again, half way through the scan, the remote device dropped the link. I rebooted and tried again to confirm and sure enough, half way through the scan, the adapter drops the link and this time locks up completely and I have to manually reboot (as I have had to do the previous times). Maybe it was firmware so I changed my IP again and I logged into the upstream (master) unit and upgraded the firmware twice (I did find a bug using chrome when you update the first boot bank, the page doesn't properly refresh to reboot the device and it looks like it freezes while updating but is actually safe to reboot. after updating the first boot bank, the page refreshes properly to reboot the device when updating the backup boot bank with no problems.) to get the main and backup banks updated. After that updated, I ran another scan and it still dropped but this time, the scan made it up to the remote device and I was able to get the IP and logged in after another reboot. I done the same firmware update and I get the link back up and try the scan again and this time it drops the link and automatically reboots the remote device and the link comes back as soon as the device comes back up, progress. Now I'm thinking ok so maybe it's such a large volume of packets in such a small amount of time that the unencrypted link is dropped to prevent an attack, encrypting the link should help then. I encrypted the link, got the link back up, working great, scan, drop, reboot... Now, I have both devices fully updated, encrypted, both set to dhcp, and everything is working great EXCEPT for when running the IP scan.
I don't imagine the customer is going to be doing a lot of IP scans, but the issue makes me uneasy enough to reconsider deploying MoCA in the future (at least until I can test other brands to see if they fail at this as well). goCoax, do you have any thoughts on what the problem is?
Thanks for revisiting this. The adapter does not show up on a client scan on UniFi management software, but the switches on the ends of the nodes do as well as their port & client usage. It seems the nodes continouously go off line.
They don't care. They never reply to issues with their products interoperating in the real world.