Weird issue with N-Tron 7000 & 1756-ENBT

[patrickmoneyy]

Hi all,

So I have a problem with several VFD panels using N-Tron 7018TX switches connecting power flex 525 drives to an ENBT card.

If you replace the control module on the power flex 525 it will not establish a connection to the PLC for almost exactly 15 minutes. After that you can power cycle it or reinstall it and it will reconnect fine.

I've tested this with multiple panels as well as on a test bench with only the 525 connected to the ENBT through the NTron and it always happens.

If I replace the ENBT with an EN2T the problem goes away.
If I replace the NTron with a stratix switch the problem goes away.

What I'd like to know is if I'm missing something in the configuration of the switch that could be causing this issue. It would be very costly to replace all of the ENBT or all of the switches, so I'm hoping I can find another solution.

 

[patrickmoneyy]

What I've done so far:

Manually set speed/duplex to 100/full on all 3 devices.
Ensured both the switch and the bridge have the most recent firmware.

Really not sure what settings I would need to change on the switch, since it seems to work perfectly fine with a stratix 2000 unmanaged switch.
Other than setting the IP address of the switch all other settings are default.

 

[patrickmoneyy]

I think I'm just going to have to give up on this one. I can inconsistently get the problem to go away by configuring the gateway of the ENBT to the switch closest to it. Works sometimes, doesn't work others.
Doesn't matter, I shouldn't have to set a gateway on anything in a segmented network of drives connected to an ENBT card.
I'm just going to make plans to upgrade them all to EN2T cards down the line and that will resolve the issue.

 

[harryting]

I been dealing with my own weird issue with AB and switches so I'm following this.

ENBT has been out of support for long time now the firmware haven't seen an update for at least 5 years, if not longer. Since 7000 is a managed switch, any special configuration on it like STP, IGMP, or ring protocol turned on? Can you look at the switch's diagnostic and see anything? Were you able to ping the drive during that 15 minutes?

 

[patrickmoneyy]

I can ping the drive and see it in rslinx. The ports on the switch report fine and forwarding. I have tried disabling almost every managed feature one at a time and individually, including igmp and stp. None of the redundancy features are on. No vlans either. Just an ENBT, 4 ntron switches, and 30-40 vfds. Also worth noting if I make any configuration change in the ENBT or reseat it it will immediately reconnect. I don't know what I'm looking at, but I did turn on port mirroring and tried Wireshark. All I see is TCP sync sequence from the ENBT to the drive, followed by retries over and over.

 

[kamenges]

It sounds like you have multiple N-tron 7000 sereis switches in this configuration. Just as a check, have you set the IP addresses of each of the switches to a unique address?

Keith

 

[patrickmoneyy]

It sounds like you have multiple N-tron 7000 sereis switches in this configuration. Just as a check, have you set the IP addresses of each of the switches to a unique address?

Keith

Yes, each switch has a unique address.