Ethernet issue, HL2 not getting IP address

[Grégory Salaun]

Hello,

I have one HL2 working very well that I bought 1 month ago and bought a second one less than 2 weeks ago.

I am having issues with the second one since I changed the mac address to have both on the same network.

I also flashed the firmware to have 10 slices for receive to use it for skimming purpose.

It worked for a couple of days and suddenly while turning it on it does not get an ip address.

The D2, D3 are blinking and SPD and HW are solid on.

When I try to to the factory reset I see that the mac address is back to the factory one with Wireshard but still it does not get any IP. Neither an IP from my DHCP server nor an APIPA.

So I tried to connect it directly to my computer and changed the ip of my computer to 169.254.19.1 and tried to ping/connect to 169.254.19.221, it did not work.

I did a nmap as well as an advanced IP scanner on 169.254.0.0/16 which took a few hours and the HL2 was also not discovered.

What else can I do to solve this ?

Of course I tried different cables, power supply and also tried the cable which is currently in use with my first HL2 which works well and no result as well.

Thanks for your help

XV9BPO Greg

[radi...@mail.com]

See Steve's post in this thread here:

https://groups.google.com/g/hermes-lite/c/lAtJkx8YHFg/m/qSFXiR7NCAAJ

Boot to factory image (silver paper method) then download and start HL2 in Spark SDR and use tool (the menu called by three dots top right of Spark screen) to reset the IP address.

73

Max

[Grégory Salaun]

I wish I could but as mentioned when I boot to factory image the HL2 is still not recognize by SparkSDR nor any other program hence I cannot do that.

[Grégory Salaun]

Maybe I should try to upload a new firmware with an Altera USB blaster to solve this problem, what do you think ?

[radi...@mail.com]

I'm no network expert (very very far from it) but this looks like maybe an issue with your network, just going by the 169.254 address?

Maybe read this post?

https://www.globalknowledge.com/us-en/resources/resource-library/articles/where-did-that-169-254-x-x-ip-address-come-from/#gref

I am sure many others on here far wiser than me will have an answer for you before long.

73

Max

[Grégory Salaun]

Hi Max,

My problem is not DHCP, I am quite knowledgeable in this field and again the Hermes if not DHCP would fall back to APIPA and in this case I would be able to connect to but the HL2 is not taking any ip address at all.

Neither one on my network nor APIPA.

I also have another HL2 which has no issue to get an IP from my DHCP server.

There was another person having the same issue but I do not know how he solved it finally in this thread: https://groups.google.com/g/hermes-lite/c/43rbb7Rx2ro

I guess I will try to upload a new firmware with the Altera blaster and see if this works.

Thanks for your help

[Michael Aust]

Hmmm….

 Just a thought, when you changed this to a 10 band receiver, did you accidentally set it up for a Static IP address that now not correct since it changed Dynamically and now can not find that IP since that address really exist now and it is stuck not finding it on your network 

73

Mike

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 29, 2023, at 6:31 AM, radi...@mail.com <radi...@mail.com> wrote:

I'm no network expert (very very far from it) but this looks like maybe an issue with your network, just going by the 169.254 address?

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[Michael Aust]

Perhaps the IP address that stored does not exist or got corrupted 

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 29, 2023, at 7:31 AM, Michael Aust <wb6d...@icloud.com> wrote:

Hmmm….

 Just a thought, when you changed this to a 10 band receiver, did you accidentally set it up for a Static IP address that now not correct since it changed Dynamically and now can not find that IP since that address now does not exist and it is stuck not finding it on your network 

[Grégory Salaun]

Thanks Mike for your input.

Actually I did not fixed the ip on the Hermes itself I did put on my firewall/router the IP i wanted based on the mac address, so I did not fixed it on SparkSDR but it looks a bit like this yes but the thing is with the factory image reboot it should not be a problem right ?

This is actually what concerns me the most, it should be able to go back to DHCP with the factory image reboot which it does not seem to do.

[Michael Aust]

Perhaps try to get the firmware from MakerLabs and find the method used 

To flash the AD9866 from MakerFabs 

might do the trick

Perhaps that what you are doing now

to restore it to original conditions

73

Mike

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 29, 2023, at 8:41 AM, Grégory Salaun <rou...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Mike for your input.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hermes-lite/77c5fd99-1d18-4222-8562-390269faed4fn%40googlegroups.com.

[Grégory Salaun]

Yes I think this is my only option.

Not sure how they do and with which firmware if someone knows here in the group that would be very helpful.

Thanks for your time

[Michael Aust]

I remember seeing the procedure written up

And Cable, etc on GitHub open source forum and mentioned on one of the Hermes-Lite forums when I was researching before I acquired my Hermes-Lite 2 

Hope that helps

73

Mike

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 29, 2023, at 11:03 AM, Grégory Salaun <rou...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes I think this is my only option.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hermes-lite/ba3d7436-5050-401d-9616-e7bb4db94936n%40googlegroups.com.

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Greg,

Just to double check, when booting in factory mode, you short tip/ring/shield of CW/KEY before power and for at least 10 seconds after power is applied? 

Have you been doing this every time when applying power to test? Booting once in factory mode doesn't reset anything, it just picks a different image from the EEPROM at boot time.

Since booting in factory mode ignores and altered MAC or fixed IP settings, are you testing without your working HL2 on the same network?

I want to be sure you successfully booted in factory mode as there have been other cases when units were shipped half way around the world to me only for me to discover the user did not correctly boot in factory mode.

You did say that you confirmed with WireShark that the MAC address reverted to the default when you booted in factory mode. Did you also see a DHCP request from the HL2? Please share your WireShark capture for one minute at and after booting the faulty HL2 in factory mode.

Are D2 and D3 blinking at the same frequency, or is D2 blinking twice as fast?

The faulty unit from Pez had a defective KSZ9021 ethernet phy which was only connecting at 100Mbs. Can you test at 100Mbs? I have an old 100Mbs switch which I use to do this. I don't think your problem is the same as your unit worked for a few days.

I don't think reflashing the gateware will make any difference. The alternate ethernet MAC and fixed IP are stored in a different EEPROM. All gateware looks there for values. Booting in bypass mode and then resetting any corrupted values has always worked if that is the issue. If you really want to try this, you can use a Raspberrry Pi:

https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/wiki/Raspberry-Pi-Test-and-Program

If you still  have problems after we confirm that you have booted in factory mode and investigated your WireShark traces, then we should have Makerfabs replace your HL2 board or send it to me for repair. Where are you located?

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Alan Hopper]

Hi Greg,

sorry I have not read every response on this thread so this may already been covered,  but it is worth mentioning that you should power down/ disconnect any other HL2 before trying to change the mac or anything else if they start on the same mac.  The results of not doing this are highly unpredictable.

73 Alan M0NNB 

[Grégory Salaun]

Hi Steve,

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply to me.

To answer your question, yes when I do boot in factory mode i ground TRS before applying power and well over 10 seconds after powering up.

I have been testing many times this. The only difference when booting in factory mode compared to the normal boot is indeed that the D2 blinks faster, when in normal boot, D2 and D3 are same speed but when I boot up on factory mode D2 is twice as fast as D3 but nothing changes.

When I have ran all these test I actually took my laptop + a small linksys switch (100mb) and connected on an isolated network the laptop to the switch and the HL2 to the same switch.

When doing this test I indeed put Wireshark with an arp filter and indeed while booting up there are 4 DHCP discover requests sent from the HL2.

This is where I saw that indeed there is a change in the mac address (reverting to factory default) when booting in factory mode compared to normal boot.

It is very easy for me to see when I booted normally compared to booted up with factory mode as the D2 indicates it as blinking faster than on normal boot up.

I will do again the test and provide you with wireshark screenshots with boot up in factory mode. I will do in another post.

I do confirm that I connected in 100Mb but it was working on the 1Gbs network for a couple of days indeed.

I checked also on the thread and my pHY I have:

KSZ

9021RN

2108A2U

210839C

I checked the R34 as well and confirmed I had a 4,99K which is supposed to be ok as well, please confirm (68B).

Ok I though reflashing would make all the network settings back to default but if it does not change anything then I do not think this is going to change anything to my problem unfortunately.

For the RPi just for my info, is this working with a RPi 4 ? I thought this procedure was for RPi 3 (which I do not have, only have a 4 here).

I live in Vietnam.

Let me do the test and revert with the wireshark info, I will do both test with and without factory mode so you can see the difference in the mac address.

Thanks very much again for taking the time to answer me, very much appreciated.

Greg XV9BPO/XV9Q

[Grégory Salaun]

Thanks Alan, I conducted all the tests both on same network with other HL2 (turned off) as well as on an isolated network with my laptop/HL2 connected to a switch (only laptop and HL2 on the switch not connected to my main network).

[Grégory Salaun]

Steve,

Sorry correction, the filter in Wireshark was DHCP of course not ARP as I mentioned.

I have ran the test again, both with normal boot and factory mode boot. You can see that mac address, indeed, is changed properly back to factory default when booted up in factory mode.

I have kept my wireshark opened if you need me to extend other section of the information box.

See below:

I first did a normal boot up which are the first 4 DHCP requests. (D2, D3, D4 blinking same speed at the same time, D5 solid on)

Then I did the factory mode boot which are the 5 to 8th request in below screen (D2 blinking twice as fast as D3 and D4 and D5 is solid on)

Should you need additional information please let me know.

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Greg,

It looks like you are correctly booting in factory recovery mode. You see the DHCP discover requests from the HL2, but do you ever see a DHCP offer from your DHCP server?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Host_Configuration_Protocol

Please save the WireShark capture file with no filters when booting in factory recovery mode and share that file.

The blink rate of D2 should always be fast (twice a second) for the ksz9021. Since it is slow for you when you do a normal boot, this indicates that you installed an older 10 receiver gateware version that does not support the ksz9021. (Under some circumstances it may work but not reliably.) Did you install the latest 10 receiver gateware from here:

https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/tree/master/gateware/bitfiles/stable/20210730_73p2/variants/hl2b5up_cicrx

I think you have a corrupted fixed IP address. We need to try to boot in factory recovery mode with a successful DHCP address assignment. Then you can disable the fixed IP. For some reason, there have been cases of the fixed IP address becoming enabled and corrupted. After that, you can install the correct 10 receiver gateware.

You did try to connect to the APIPA address after factory boot, which is the address that will be used. But some software and networks just have difficulty connecting to this address so I am not convinced. Can you connect your good HL2 directly to your laptop and use the APIPA address, but not your bad HL2? You may also want to try hermeslite.py:

https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/tree/master/software/hermeslite

73,

Steve

kf7o

[Jon AB8WU]

Are you certain the switch/router Ethernet port and Ethernet cable are still good. I have seen a cable develop a fault with a kink that's almost imperceptible. Can you drop this troublesome device exactly in place of the working one? It's an easy test to help rule out physical faults in your equipment.

[Grégory Salaun]

Hi Jon,

Yes I am sure as I tested multiple ones and I also tested the one which works with my first HL2.

[Grégory Salaun]

Hi Steve,

In the test I did I only connected Laptop => switch 100Mb <= HL2

So no DHCP here I could do on my network but I have 50+ devices so the wireshark will go crazy.

But yesterday when I checked on my firewall (pfsense) yes it offered an IP address, I have tested here and I put the screenshot below.

As you can see I tested both the normal boot and factory recovery mode boot and it offers an IP for both 10.10.10.247 for normal boot and 10.10.10.149 for factory mode boot (to be noted that this IP is the one used by the first HL2 which works and which was obviously OFF for this test)

I did put the proper firmware see the screenshot below as well, download on 25th September and when my issues started the following day.

I agree that we need to try to boot in factory recover mode with a successful DHCP but how to do that ? The pfSense firewall is definitely offering an IP but for some reasons the HL2 does not pick it up or does not take it.

As you recommended I tested the good HL2 the same way as the bad HL2 ie Laptop => Switch 100Mb <= Good HL2.

After 10 seconds the D3 blink to confirm APIPA/Fix IP, I launched SparkSDR and it is immediately recognize as you can see below

I can try hermeslite.py but as the bad HL2 cannot get any ip it is just not reachable so I do not see how this could work, isn't it ?

Let me run the test again with bad HL2 and share the wireshark file without any filters.

I will put the file in the following post.

[Grégory Salaun]

Steve,

Here is the requested file.

Hope this is what you need.

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for sharing the capture file. I don't see the dhcp offers in the file, but do see them in the other material you posted. Since you can connect to the APIPA address with your good HL2 but not with the bad HL2 on the same exact setup, I suspect something has gone bad with your newer HL2. Makerfabs should replace it for you, and I will send a private e-mail about that.

One thing I still don't understand is why your D2 is blinking slowly with KSZ9021 and the latest 10 receiver gateware. I just double-checked and I see a fast D2 blink with that gateware. Maybe it is related to the fault with your HL2. What is the md5sum of the .rbf file you installed?

shaynal@sonata:~/Downloads$ md5sum hl2b5up_cicrx.rbf
cb87ea15971d5a853fe5bfda70137381  hl2b5up_cicrx.rbf

73,

Steve

kf7p

[Simon Brown]

Steve,

Just FWIW I've been using two HL2, and older one for development, a brand-new one for on-air. I have seen my on-air revert to the 169.254... address and fail to be given a DHCP address. After leaving it off for 24 hours it now works with DHCP and I've now set the EEPROM IP address which works well. I did also see an unexpired lease for the MAC address.

I can only suspect that 'messing' around with two HL2 with the same MAC either confused my DHCP host (TP-Link AX50) or triggered a security feature in the AX50. I have only had one on my network at a time as I only have one 12v PSU.

Anyway, I now have my new HL2 working superbly.

Simon Brown

https://g4eli.com

https://sdr-radio.com

---

From: herme...@googlegroups.com <herme...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Steve Haynal <softerh...@gmail.com>

Thanks for sharing the capture file. I don't see the dhcp offers in the file, but do see them in the other material you posted. Since you can connect to the APIPA address with your good HL2 but not with the bad HL2 on the same exact setup, I suspect something has gone bad with your newer HL2. Makerfabs should replace it for you, and I will send a private e-mail about that.

[...]

[Grégory Salaun]

Hi Steve,

Yes the DHCP offer do not appear as I was testing on the Laptop + HL2 only network not to have thousands of line, if required I can do it on my LAN.

The MD5 of my hl2b5up_circx.rbf is a438a05451894fa1ac1b0bbcb6e80046

So sad I cannot make this second HL2 work :(

[Jiri Culak]

Hi all

maybe I am litle late to the party but I run three (3) HL2 and two RedPitayas running OpenHPSDR PRotocol 1 all on same broadcast domain. 

I ran into simillar issues - mainly when I was using my old trusty Motorola (Extreme Netoworks) RFS4000 WirelessController / Switch / PoE etc.as a both access switch and dhcp etc. Reason was that when powercut occured - HL2 boots up in seconds.... RFS4000 took 5 minutes to boot up, put all access ports up and start dhcpd....  At this time around, HL2 were not asking for DHCP anymore. I had to actually do following:

1. When on of the HL2 refused to get an IP , after leaving it off for few hours I turned it on connected directly to laptop, and managed to get 169.254.x.x address tlking using Quisk. I then opted out for all IP addresses to be FIXED instead - and changed to ast two octets of mac. My differece is - I yet dont run 10 slices RX gateware.... 

If you do have Raspberry PI I would try to flash the FPGA direct, but as Steve pointed out - MaerFabs might help....altough its a long run (timewise).

Give it ago - and try to turn everything off - (powercycle the firewall/dhcp also). I found out that stateful packet inspection didnt like the fact it took me some time to change MAC and it thought someone is spooking the IP<MAC> bindings and it fingerprinted the device and no matter what I did, it would somehow blacklist it.

I hope you get it sorted! Its a great rig... and honestly - even in CQ WW I dont see much difference in ADC perf.compared to LTC2208 which is 16 bit.

73 Jiri

Dne neděle 1. října 2023 v 18:16:17 UTC+2 uživatel rou...@gmail.com napsal:

[Grégory Salaun]

Tanks Jiri for your input.

I use a software firewall/router (pfSense), it was rebooted already several time.

And I had the HL2 disconnected for entire night or even all day long but still can't get the APIPA address.

At this point even if it takes weeks to solve the problem with Makerfabs i do not really have a choice as this HL2 is unusable right now.

I am scared if I get a new one to flash the firmware for the 10 rx again to be honest.

[Grégory Salaun]

I did not turn on the HL2 for 24h so I tried to boot it and turned off my DHCP server on my router and turned on another DHCP (adguard) just to try out.

HL2 still does not get any IP neither on normal boot nor on factory recovery mode.

Still no luck.

[Steve Haynal]

Hi Greg,

I believe everything has been arranged with Makerfabs for your replacement HL2.

The 10RX gateware you installed has a MD5SUM for the 20201212_72p8. The one you want is for 20210730_73p2 which has ksz9021 support. There are two releases in the stable area and you want the latest one. I'll move the older one to avoid future confusion. I can't think of any reason running the wrong gateware could cause hardware to go bad, just that you would not have a reliable connection.

https://github.com/softerhardware/Hermes-Lite2/tree/master/gateware/bitfiles/stable

73,

Steve

kf7o