2 out of 4 boards present a problem with internet (ethernet)

[g_t_j]

I got my order 2 days ago and first thing I did was to try if everything works right. 
I got 4 Pines (2GGB version).

After I successfully created 3 Sandisk 16GB (uhs-1 uU3) android sd cards with the latest build, I started testing them
All 4 booted flawlessly within seconds. However, only 2 of them can browse the internet and connect to Play Store.

They do get an IP assigned while date and time get also synchronized, nevertheless it is like if they are not connected to the internet at all! I'm unable to browse any site (not even Google) and Play Store displays connection error.

After I saw this behaviour by 2 of my Pines, I decided I will run all 4 under the same circumstances (same 20awg usb lead, Anker 2.4A PSU, connected to my Gigabit switch with a specific 50cm Cat7 Ethernet cable, same microSD)

The same 2 that initially had problems, persisted the same behaviour (got IP and date/time but no internet)

I subsequently tried the Wifi/BT module with those 2 and successfully connected to the internet.

At this point, I started believing there is a problem with their Gigabit chip. It was then that I thought I had to try another OS. I burnt an image with xbuntu (latest longsleep's version). The 2 specific Pines booted within seconds and connected to the internet successfully. I browsed the internet with Pidora and they were quite responsive.

However, when I tried a speed test (speedtest.net) I got only 0.5/5 and 5/5 respectively while my usual speeds are 74/5.

That said, upload speed doesn't seem to be affected. Download is hammered though!

I have seen some users recommending one should push the Gigabit network to 100Mbit in order to achieve decent download speeds. Despite I don't know how am I supposed to be doing this, I am willing to try.

The question is why 2 of my Pines perform excellent within my Gigabt network while the other 2 don't?
Is there a possibility those 2 being faulty? With just 30 days of warranty I don't have much time to experiment or wait for updates. If there is no solution soon I'll have to send those 2 back as they clearly underperform under pretty much all conditions.

ANY RECOMMENDATIONS BEFORE I PRONOUNCE THEM FAULTY?

---

By the way the board exceeded my expectations. I was expecting something MUCH WORSE judging by all these posts lately with dozens of different problems users have faced as of now. However, latest Android works really smooth and fast for me with no crashes whatsoever. I can see smooth 1080p YouTube videos through YouTube app and browsing the internet is flawless. Ubuntu worked also quite well during the few minutes I tested it. I suggest all those who face any kind of problems to use a good quality SD card, burn a rooted DD image of the size of their card with Win32diskimager, use short 20AWG charging cables and a known-branded PSU rated over 2A. Provided you do all these, I doubt you will have problems or instability issues.

Good job guys. I can see some serious potential on the Pine. This thing can only get better from now on!

[untoldforce]

I have the same issue with my board. I only have one, but it doesn't work in Android or Remix OS, and has severe connection problems in Ubuntu. Strangely enough, Debian doesn't seem to have those issues. I'm thinking of getting a RMA because nobody can come up with a solid answer of what to do, since I wanted the board to work with Android/Remix.

[g_t_j]

I have the same issue with my board. I only have one, but it doesn't work in Android or Remix OS, and has severe connection problems in Ubuntu. Strangely enough, Debian doesn't seem to have those issues. I'm thinking of getting a RMA because nobody can come up with a solid answer of what to do, since I wanted the board to work with Android/Remix.

Yes, it seems we are on the same boat.
It is very strange that they will get a connection (even if slow) in Ubuntu while on Android there are no traces it is connected apart from date and time and the fact I can see an IP assigned on Device Status.

If it is to be fixed somehow soon with an upcoming update, I will gladly wait but what is it going to happen if the 30-day time passes?

[moondark]

I got my order 2 days ago and first thing I did was to try if everything works right. 
I got 4 Pines (2GGB version).

After I successfully created 3 Sandisk 16GB (uhs-1 uU3) android sd cards with the latest build, I started testing them
All 4 booted flawlessly within seconds. However, only 2 of them can browse the internet and connect to Play Store.

They do get an IP assigned while date and time get also synchronized, nevertheless it is like if they are not connected to the internet at all! I'm unable to browse any site (not even Google) and Play Store displays connection error.

After I saw this behaviour by 2 of my Pines, I decided I will run all 4 under the same circumstances (same 20awg usb lead, Anker 2.4A PSU, connected to my Gigabit switch with a specific 50cm Cat7 Ethernet cable, same microSD)

The same 2 that initially had problems, persisted the same behaviour (got IP and date/time but no internet)

I subsequently tried the Wifi/BT module with those 2 and successfully connected to the internet.

At this point, I started believing there is a problem with their Gigabit chip. It was then that I thought I had to try another OS. I burnt an image with xbuntu (latest longsleep's version). The 2 specific Pines booted within seconds and connected to the internet successfully. I browsed the internet with Pidora and they were quite responsive.

However, when I tried a speed test (speedtest.net) I got only 0.5/5 and 5/5 respectively while my usual speeds are 74/5.

That said, upload speed doesn't seem to be affected. Download is hammered though!

I have seen some users recommending one should push the Gigabit network to 100Mbit in order to achieve decent download speeds. Despite I don't know how am I supposed to be doing this, I am willing to try.

The question is why 2 of my Pines perform excellent within my Gigabt network while the other 2 don't?
Is there a possibility those 2 being faulty? With just 30 days of warranty I don't have much time to experiment or wait for updates. If there is no solution soon I'll have to send those 2 back as they clearly underperform under pretty much all conditions.

ANY RECOMMENDATIONS BEFORE I PRONOUNCE THEM FAULTY?

---

By the way the board exceeded my expectations. I was expecting something MUCH WORSE judging by all these posts lately with dozens of different problems users have faced as of now. However, latest Android works really smooth and fast for me with no crashes whatsoever. I can see smooth 1080p YouTube videos through YouTube app and browsing the internet is flawless. Ubuntu worked also quite well during the few minutes I tested it. I suggest all those who face any kind of problems to use a good quality SD card, burn a rooted DD image of the size of their card with Win32diskimager, use short 20AWG charging cables and a known-branded PSU rated over 2A. Provided you do all these, I doubt you will have problems or instability issues.

Good job guys. I can see some serious potential on the Pine. This thing can only get better from now on!

So, it seems that you just confirmed that the gigabit ethernet issues half of people are having is a hardware defect. If you just tested them in the same conditions with the same image, it is unlikely that the problem is in the software. Now, how to get a replacement?

[g_t_j]

I got my order 2 days ago and first thing I did was to try if everything works right. 
I got 4 Pines (2GGB version).

After I successfully created 3 Sandisk 16GB (uhs-1 uU3) android sd cards with the latest build, I started testing them
All 4 booted flawlessly within seconds. However, only 2 of them can browse the internet and connect to Play Store.

They do get an IP assigned while date and time get also synchronized, nevertheless it is like if they are not connected to the internet at all! I'm unable to browse any site (not even Google) and Play Store displays connection error.

After I saw this behaviour by 2 of my Pines, I decided I will run all 4 under the same circumstances (same 20awg usb lead, Anker 2.4A PSU, connected to my Gigabit switch with a specific 50cm Cat7 Ethernet cable, same microSD)

The same 2 that initially had problems, persisted the same behaviour (got IP and date/time but no internet)

I subsequently tried the Wifi/BT module with those 2 and successfully connected to the internet.

At this point, I started believing there is a problem with their Gigabit chip. It was then that I thought I had to try another OS. I burnt an image with xbuntu (latest longsleep's version). The 2 specific Pines booted within seconds and connected to the internet successfully. I browsed the internet with Pidora and they were quite responsive.

However, when I tried a speed test (speedtest.net) I got only 0.5/5 and 5/5 respectively while my usual speeds are 74/5.

That said, upload speed doesn't seem to be affected. Download is hammered though!

I have seen some users recommending one should push the Gigabit network to 100Mbit in order to achieve decent download speeds. Despite I don't know how am I supposed to be doing this, I am willing to try.

The question is why 2 of my Pines perform excellent within my Gigabt network while the other 2 don't?
Is there a possibility those 2 being faulty? With just 30 days of warranty I don't have much time to experiment or wait for updates. If there is no solution soon I'll have to send those 2 back as they clearly underperform under pretty much all conditions.

ANY RECOMMENDATIONS BEFORE I PRONOUNCE THEM FAULTY?

---

By the way the board exceeded my expectations. I was expecting something MUCH WORSE judging by all these posts lately with dozens of different problems users have faced as of now. However, latest Android works really smooth and fast for me with no crashes whatsoever. I can see smooth 1080p YouTube videos through YouTube app and browsing the internet is flawless. Ubuntu worked also quite well during the few minutes I tested it. I suggest all those who face any kind of problems to use a good quality SD card, burn a rooted DD image of the size of their card with Win32diskimager, use short 20AWG charging cables and a known-branded PSU rated over 2A. Provided you do all these, I doubt you will have problems or instability issues.

Good job guys. I can see some serious potential on the Pine. This thing can only get better from now on!

So, it seems that you just confirmed that the gigabit ethernet issues half of people are having is a hardware defect. If you just tested them in the same conditions with the same image, it is unlikely that the problem is in the software. Now, how to get a replacement?

I fear this is the case. I'm willing to do further testing with recommendations from more experienced users but the fact that 2 of my Pines literally FLY while the other 2 being slow as hell, it's something that worries me...

[longsleep]

Play around with the rx and tx delay values in https://github.com/longsleep/build-pine6...2562-L2563 and check if you can find values where the non working board start working.

[g_t_j]

Play around with the rx and tx delay values in https://github.com/longsleep/build-pine6...2562-L2563 and check if you can find values where the non working board start working.

Thanks for your answer.

Is there by any chance a tutorial for this procedure? This is completely new to me. Do I have to obtain these values through Ubuntu?

Since I made the post, I did another test. I tested the 2 ''working'' boards with xbuntu and run speedtest net. 
Both boards reached the maximum potential of my internet speed - 74 mbps download / 5 mbps upload. Also tested the 2 ''non-working'' ones again and they performed 2.4mbps download / 5mbps upload  and 5mbps download / 5mbps upload respectively.

[longsleep]

Well testing internet speed is pretty pointless. You should have a 'known-to-be-fast' peer and use iperf2 or iperf3 for testing locally, ideally with a direct connection (no switch).

There are plenty of guides out there how to rebuild a device tree from source.

Try something like this (all as root):

Code:

sudo su -

# install dt compiler
apt-get install device-tree-compiler

# download source device tree for Pine64+ to /boot/pine64
wget https://github.com/longsleep/build-pine64-image/raw/master/blobs/pine64.dts -O /boot/pine64/sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dts

# Switch directory to /boot/pine64 and edit using Vi
cd /boot/pine64
vi sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dts
# make modifications now

# Compile modified device tree
dtc -O dtb -o pine64-plus-custom.dtb sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dts

# Make U-Boot load modified device tree
echo "fdt_filename=pine64/pine64-plus-custom.dtb" >>/boot/uEnv.txt

reboot

Note that these instruction do only work for device tree values used by the Kernel (like the sunxi-gmac settings). Also these instructions are for Pine64+ only!

rx-delay seems to be ok as 0.
tx-delay is 3 by default in my builds. In Android i think it is 2. Try modifying tx-delay only and keep the value between 0 and 7. Valid range for rx-delay is 0-31.

Also note that the values for rx and tx-delay are to be given as hex (base 16).

I suggest you set a static IP address for eth0 before playing with this, as DHCP will fail for incompatible values and DHCP has a 5 minute timeout on boot.

Have fun

[androsch]

So, it seems that you just confirmed that the gigabit ethernet issues half of people are having is a hardware defect. If you just tested them in the same conditions with the same image, it is unlikely that the problem is in the software. Now, how to get a replacement?

I fear this is the case. I'm willing to do further testing with recommendations from more experienced users but the fact that 2 of my Pines literally FLY while the other 2 being slow as hell, it's something that worries me...

Can you verify all of your boards are exactly same hardware versions (e.g. Rev B) and date?
Would be interesting to compare with others having similar problems like me....

Gesendet von meinem K00L mit Tapatalk

[g_t_j]

Well testing internet speed is pretty pointless. You should have a 'known-to-be-fast' peer and use iperf2 or iperf3 for testing locally, ideally with a direct connection (no switch).

There are plenty of guides out there how to rebuild a device tree from source.

Try something like this (all as root):

Code:

sudo su -

# install dt compiler
apt-get install device-tree-compiler

# download source device tree for Pine64+ to /boot/pine64
wget https://github.com/longsleep/build-pine64-image/raw/master/blobs/pine64.dts -O /boot/pine64/sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dts

# Switch directory to /boot/pine64 and edit using Vi
cd /boot/pine64
vi sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dts
# make modifications now

# Compile modified device tree
dtc -O dtb -o pine64-plus-custom.dtb sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dts

# Make U-Boot load modified device tree
echo "fdt_filename=pine64/pine64-plus-custom.dtb" >>/boot/uEnv.txt

reboot

Note that these instruction do only work for device tree values used by the Kernel (like the sunxi-gmac settings). Also these instructions are for Pine64+ only!

rx-delay seems to be ok as 0.
tx-delay is 3 by default in my builds. In Android i think it is 2. Try modifying tx-delay only and keep the value between 0 and 7. Valid range for rx-delay is 0-31.

Also note that the values for rx and tx-delay are to be given as hex (base 16).

I suggest you set a static IP address for eth0 before playing with this, as DHCP will fail for incompatible values and DHCP has a 5 minute timeout on boot.

Have fun

I will try this as soon as I get home. Many thanks!

---

So, it seems that you just confirmed that the gigabit ethernet issues half of people are having is a hardware defect. If you just tested them in the same conditions with the same image, it is unlikely that the problem is in the software. Now, how to get a replacement?

I fear this is the case. I'm willing to do further testing with recommendations from more experienced users but the fact that 2 of my Pines literally FLY while the other 2 being slow as hell, it's something that worries me...

Can you verify all of your boards are exactly same hardware versions (e.g. Rev B) and date?
Would be interesting to compare with others having similar problems like me....

Gesendet von meinem K00L mit Tapatalk

If  I recall correctly, all my boards have manufacture date 21-03-2016.
I will verify and update as soon as I get home. Same goes for revision versions.