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CIA · Jul 22, 2009, 04:08 PM

Friend just bought a refurb 2.66 Macbook Pro from the Apple Refurb site. Model 5,1. She brought it in to get setup here at work and while the wireless was working fine we couldn't get it to recognize any physical network connections with ethernet cable. After trying several different jack/cable combinations we decided her port was bad and she booked a appt. at the Apple Store.
She comes back today and says the port worked fine at the Apple store, and that the genius told her that she has to use Cat 5e cable for it to work. We looked around here at work, and sure enough everything we were using for patch cables to the wall were just normal cat 5. No other computers, be they mac or PC were having any issues. We whipped up a cat 5e cable, plugged it into the wall and the her laptop, and lo and behold it worked.

Anyone else ever hear about things like this happening?
We now are swapping out all our old cat 5 patch cables with new cat 5e.

seanc · Jul 22, 2009, 04:58 PM

Are you running gigabit switches?

It could be that the MBP was trying to run at gigabit speeds over a Cat 5 cable, which won't work. Cat 5e can usually handle gigabit, Cat 6 is a sure fire way to have it work.

Big Mac · Jul 22, 2009, 05:20 PM

"Odd wired network port" on your MBP made it sound like some exotic, alien networking port happened to be there instead of just ethernet.

CIA · Jul 22, 2009, 05:55 PM

We are running a mix of 100BT and 1000BT. No one who works here now was really around when the wires were installed in the walls so who knows what's in there. Probably Cat5. I'll pull the plate off one of the wall ports at some point and see if I can read the cable. Either way most of the computers (Mix of Mac and PC) say they are running 1000BT. The distance from the computers to the 1000BT switch is very short, which might explain why it seems to work. I am certainly getting speeds above 100BT on my MacPro, but since my patch cable was just cat5 and who knows what the walls are I don't know if we're getting the most of our gigabit network. Most of the station has transitioned over to a fiber network anyway since that's what the Avid setup uses for shared media. Being a lone FCP holdout I have all my video locally stored so network isn't that huge of a deal. The exception being when I need to send a competed video to someone else's machine.

Either way I hadn't seen the issue that her MBP was showing before. Even if the network cable sucked most machines will still at least show that they are connected. Since every other laptop here could plug into those same cables and work fine it sure didn't seem like the problem was our network. I figured the MBP would just auto adjust the connection down to 100BT if 1000BT was unreliable...

ibook_steve · Jul 22, 2009, 06:48 PM

Originally Posted by CIA

Either way I hadn't seen the issue that her MBP was showing before. Even if the network cable sucked most machines will still at least show that they are connected. Since every other laptop here could plug into those same cables and work fine it sure didn't seem like the problem was our network. I figured the MBP would just auto adjust the connection down to 100BT if 1000BT was unreliable...

It should if Ethernet was set to be configured automatically. Check the Ethernet tab in Network Preferences after clicking Advanced for the ethernet port. If Configure was set to Manually instead of Automatically, that may be the problem.

Steve