RAK4631 and RAK13800 ethernet not working solved and lessons learnt

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Figured this may help someone having issues with ethernet POE and meshtastic

I Solved an issue I was having with brand new hardware.
I learnt with my RAK13800 Ethernet and POE RAK19018

  1. One of my switches was not negotiating speed, had to set 100BaseTX Full Duplex on the port

  2. My POE switch was not stable, Probably have to add a load resistor to the POE module as per:
    https://forum.rakwireless.com/uploads/short-url/obKRLqRhR6bbjLxT6lQXIaomSQt.pdf
    This was indicated by a ticking noise and the red led turning on and off.

  3. Currently you can only use the ethernet for MQTT and POE stuff nothing else

  4. DHCP didn’t work with the firmware the RAK4631 shipped with.

  5. Static IP settings DID not work correctly, reverted to DHCP and it worked
    I could Ping the IP I set statically, meshtastic claimed in the console to try and hit the MQTT server but a packet capture proved that not to be the case.
    Now I dont know if it was some type of config issue rolling firmware’s or what. But either way I reverted to DHCP which made it work. I may re-test my theory and update here as I have identical hardware to build another node.

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