Asante MacCon SE Troubleshooting

[PotatoFi]

I have a Shiva/Kinetics Etherport SE in my SE FDHD!



Mine does not have a 10BASE-T connector on the daughterboard, but it does have an AUI connector with a CentreCOM 210TS 10BASE-T transceiver. 



10BASE-T was well, well before my time in the networking space, but my understanding (and according to Wikipedia) is that 10BASE-T can run in either half-duplex or full-duplex mode. I'm not sure of the specifics, but it does seem like some newer devices don't support half-duplex (one side can talk at a time, think Walkie Talkies) mode. That might be what is going on with your AirPort Extreme.

For the record, my CentreCOM 10BASE-T transceiver and my Dayna SCSI/Link-T both talk happily with my Ubiquiti UniFi In-Hall HD AC (2 years old), as well as my Cisco SG300-P (4-8 years old).

 

[cheesestraws]

So, all this must be some sort of software issue rather than any hardware related issue

Yes, but the question is, which bit of the software is it?  In the mac, in the network components, or both?  Can you draw a quick diagram of how you've got things set up and where things are plugged in?

 

[LaPorta]

To confound you even further, cheesestraws, it now appears to work under both System 6 and 7. No explanation. No matter what the issue was, your suggestion to update the software seems to have universally fixed it.

 

[cheesestraws]

I'm not sure of the specifics, but it does seem like some newer devices don't support half-duplex (one side can talk at a time, think Walkie Talkies) mode.

It's usually not that they don't support it, but that the detection of which setting to use goes awry.  This is what is meant by "autonegotiation"; it's a protocol that allows each end of the link to work out what speed and duplex settings it ought to be using—i.e., what the best available settings are.

This came along later than original 10BaseT.  In theory it is backwards-compatible; if a 10BaseT device just handshakes like a legacy 10BT device, the far end is meant to assume it's 10mbit half-duplex.  But standards aren't programs; and there is wiggle room for interpretation and implementation.  So some older cards that interpreted the standards a bit skewiff from what the 802 group thought they were saying can't quite deal with autonegotiation.

 

[cheesestraws]

To confound you even further, cheesestraws, it now appears to work under both System 6 and 7. No explanation. No matter what the issue was, your suggestion to update the software seems to have universally fixed it.

Well!  That's good.  Updating software is magical!  (In that sometimes it does what you want, and sometimes something turns into a frog or something equally inconvenient).