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Problem

Raspberry Pi 4 only recognizes Ethernet cable when plugged directly into router

Background

I have Ethernet wired throughout my house using cat5 cables. My router is connected to one of the wall jacks via a cat6 Ethernet cable and my Raspberry Pi 4 is connected to a different wall jack via a cat6 cable.

I have tested the connection from:

router -> cat6 -> wall jack -> cat5 -> wall jack -> cat6 -> laptop

and the laptop picks up the signal with ease.

I have also tested the pathway with an Ethernet cable tester and all the wires are working. To make things weirder, my Raspberry Pi recognizes the cat6 Ethernet cable if the other end is plugged directly into the router. I would very much prefer not to plug the Raspberry Pi directly into the router.

Any thoughts on how I can solve this?

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  • 1
    Try paragraphs. Why do you expect an unconnected cable would do anything?
    – Milliways
    Commented Dec 15, 2020 at 10:02
  • Check the connection state with the cable plugged and unplugged like described here and see if the cable connection status is recognized in the first place.
    – FelixJN
    Commented Dec 15, 2020 at 10:40

2 Answers 2

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I think that mixing cabling types between cat-6 and cat-5 is what is causing the issue.

Please see my answer here detailing the cabling differences between the two.

I would try the following when connecting through the cat-5 cabling.

sudo ethtool –s eth0 speed 100 duplex full autoneg off
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Thanks Andyroo for responding so quickly. Looks like they work together and it was just a hardware error.

Solved:

Re-tested each ethernet cable with cable tester and one of the cat5 wires didn't like it's connection to the wall jack. Cut the wire, re-connected, and I'm getting those lovely ethernet LEDs on my raspberry pi.

I'm curious as to why that disconnected wire still allowed me to access ethernet via my laptop. Does the raspberry pi require all 8 wires connected while the laptop doesn't? Laptop is a 2019 macbook air. Using an ikling hub to connect ethernet via usb-c. Per product description...

USB C to RJ45 1000M Ethernet Port - USB C dock supports Gigabit Ethernet port, backwards compatible with 100Mbps/10Mbps RJ45 LAN.

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  • Please mark the answer as the accepted one with a click on the tick on its left side. That prevents your Question from being shown as an unsolved Post to the community and saves them/us a lot of work.
    – Ingo
    Commented Dec 20, 2020 at 11:12

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