MacMini Late 2012 Ethernet Drops dead often

Question

MacMini Late 2012 Ethernet Drops dead often

Ive set up a mac mini late 2012 running 10.8.5 with OSX Server.

It runs:
OD,DNS,DHCP,Fileshare, Printer Share.
About once a week the ethernet stops working, its setup up with static ip etc.
The only thing to get it up running again is to restart. Sometimes we have to restart it 2-3 times. And then it runs for about a week.
It seems like its the interface that shutdowns, because i cant ping it (i put static IP on my mac, in the same range as the server).
And it doesnt respond. The Mac mini cant ping anything on the local network either (pirnters etc.).

Have been digging through logs for hours, cant seem to find anything wrong there, cant even find anything to point me in the right directi

Im starting to believe its the network card that just stops working. But its weird that it works after a restart, that points me to something in SW.

Any ideas?

It takes me 30 minutes to get to the company, and 15 users just sit and wait because they cant do anything, while the servers Ethernet is down.

Would it be an idea to try thunderbolt-ethernet for a while?

Mac mini, OS X Server, 10.8.4

Posted on Nov 22, 2013 6:51 AM

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Answer 1

BDAqua

Level 10

251,273 points

Nov 22, 2013 10:19 AM in response to Christoffer Jonsson

Hi Christoffer,

Could it be an IP Lease time setting on the Router?

Does resetting the Router cure it without restarting the Mac?

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Answer 2

Nov 22, 2013 12:05 PM in response to BDAqua

Unfortunately not, the mac server has static ip (10.10.11.10). And when i put static ip on my mac within the same range, and connects to it directly i cant ping it. So the Ethernet connection is completly "dead". The weird thing is that it shows "green" in the Network Settings, but the connection in and out is dead. Very weird. And the logs doesnt show anything at all. It happend again today, so now ive created a new location for the network (to get new settings). And i took down the DHCP and put that on the router instead (so when it happen again, their internet doesnt go down), primary DNS as the server, and secondary the ISP. Im starting to wonder if this is a hw failure, but the logs should point that out that eth0 has been lost or similiar, but nothing 🙂

I rought it could be an IP conflict of some sort, but i have ruled that out.

Im Swedish, so my English could be better, but i hope its readable.

Very strange, and extremly annoying problem. Many thanks for your input.

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Answer 3

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,951 points

Nov 22, 2013 3:04 PM in response to Christoffer Jonsson

Would it be an idea to try thunderbolt-ethernet for a while?

That should tell you whether the NIC is bad.

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Answer 4

BDAqua

Level 10

251,273 points

Nov 22, 2013 6:14 PM in response to Christoffer Jonsson

Wow, your English is quite good, in fact better than most English only speakers! 🙂

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Answer 5

Nov 25, 2013 2:50 AM in response to Linc Davis

I was about to do this, but there is only one Thunderbolt, and that one is used for storage. So this isnt the solution. Any other clues?

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Answer 6

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,951 points

Nov 25, 2013 7:23 AM in response to Christoffer Jonsson

Is there some reason why you can't disconnect the external storage for the test?

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Answer 7

cmarcera

Level 1

8 points

Mar 12, 2014 9:00 AM in response to Christoffer Jonsson

Christoffer

Did you ever find any resolution to this issue? I have a 10.8.5 Mac Mini server with the same issue. The Ethernet port will randomly stop working, forcing us to make it "Inactive" then "Active" again to get it working. It just happened two days in a row, but usually it's only once a week or so.

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Answer 8

Mar 13, 2014 4:43 AM in response to Christoffer Jonsson

We have been having a similar problem for the last few weeks however it not only affected Mac minis - the majority of the Macs we have, but also a MacBook Pro.

Initially I had suspected our DHCP setup but not only have I as part of trouble-shooting this switched to a completely different DHCP server and cleaned up the allocation of addresses, but like the original poster the problem also affected some Macs with static/manual addresses.

The Mac minis were of various ages and models - not just the latest 'thin' model but also the older taller model, and are running various different OS X versions.

It seems to have stopped now thankfully and this was after we finished upgrading the firmware of all our NetGear switches, plus we also switched one of our Mac mini servers from using a KanexLive USB3 to Gigabit Ethernet adapter to instead a ThunderBolt to Ethernet adapter. I also upgraded the firmware of our SonicWall firewall/gateway at the same time.

Note: If your storage device has two Thunderbolt sockets and most do like ours, then you can put the Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter in the second socket and therefore have both the storage device and the Thunderbolt adapter connected at the same time.

The introduction of the problem may have been at the same time as either we started using the KanexLive adapter, or when I installed the previous SonicWall firmware update.

Originally it was not the server with the KanexLive adapter that was crashing it was various other computers on the same network.

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