TSW212 - Huawei Luna 2000 PCS connection issues

NETWORKING SOLUTIONS
1

I need to connect a Huawei Luna2000 Smart PCS controller. This device uses a ring network topology and I have no experience with this kind of setup. Basically the device has 2 network ports and both of them need to be connected to the network. The PCS has one IP and MAC which is somehow shared over the 2 connections. I don’t know which protocol is used for this.

When I connect the PCS to a simple TPLink unmanaged switch, everything works fine.
When I try the same connection on a TSW212 switch however, it doesn’t work. I get the typical “loop behavior” … some pings get a response but like 90% do not and after a few hours the switch is pretty much down.

I have no idea what to do … things I tried:

  • I disabled STP since this isn’t used (verified with wireshark)
  • I tried enabling Loop detection but no loop is detected and nothing is blocked.
  • The forwarding table does list the correct MAC on 1 of the 2 ports but ARP requests for the IP of the PCS stay unanswered. The second port does not show up in the forwarding table.
  • Nothing specific in the logs

What I haven’t tried yet is MRP … I didn’t know what it was and I have no experience with this. But looking at it now, it seems promising. But also something advanced and specific to industrial networking so I’d be surprised that the TPLink just handles this out of the box without issue?

Does anyone have any experience with this kind of setup? Here is a link with some info from Huawei but it doesn’t go into specifics.

https://support.huawei.com/enterprise/en/doc/EDOC1100278225/b02239c8/connecting-fe-communications-cables

Any info and help is much appreciated!

Regards

Tom

2

Hello,

MRP could indeed be helpful in your situation. Have you tried configuring the TSW212 as an MRP server with port 1 (primary) and port 2 (secondary)?

Additionally, I want to inform you that a new firmware version, TSWOS 1.4, is scheduled for release very soon, likely tomorrow. This update includes fixes for several known issues related to ring topologies.

Best regards,

3

Hi Martynas,

Thank you for your reply. I haven’t tried MRP sadly. When I was at the customer site I didn’t think about it, mostly because I’m absolutely not familiar with it. I’m kinda new at industrial networks and protocols. I did reach out to Huawei and they replied, stating they do not want to disclose the actual protocols used in their devices. They recommend using unmanaged switches to avoid these issues.

Thanks for the information on the new firmware. Next time when I’m at the customer site (should be later this month), I’ll update the switch and see if this resolves the issue. If not, I’ll try MRP but I’m not sure if this is the correct protocol for a Huawei PCS. If nothing works, I’ll have to replace the TSW212 with 2x TSW114 unmanaged devices (1 for each vlan I have on the TSW212). Those should work if the Huawei info is correct.

Thanks again for your reply. Much appreciated!
Best wishes for 2025!

Kind regards,
Tom