@Frank run you tests again with LE & a 100mbit/s port and see if it works for you. I failed to optain a proper IP address & ended up with a 169.254.x.x local link IP.
I then connected the VIM3 to a WNR3500L with fresh tomato and it worked, then I grabbed a 20m ethernet cable and connected the VIM3 straight to the next GbE port and it worked too. In my test environment I’ve splitted a cat6 cable into 2x 100mbit ports and when I connect the VIM3 to them DHCP & static IPs fail to establish a proper connection.
@balbes150 well did you ever install cat cable by yourself? If not I guess a picture won’t help you
E.g. a Cat6 cable comes with 4 twisted pair wire-pairs. If you want to transmit GbE you have to connect all 4 pairs to your patchpanel. If you can deal with 100mbit you only have to connect 2 pairs so you can use one Cat6 cable for 2 100mbit ethernet ports.
In the end this doesn’t matter because the problem is the VIM3 that does not obtain an IP at 100mbit ports.
And again these ports work fine with RPi3Bs RockPro64 & a J3455-ITX HTPC hooked to the other port. Also the VIM3 Android image works fine on this port so I’m 99,999% sure it’s related to some LE kernel quirks.
Well the house is almost 100 years old so nobody thought about wireways back in the days I also reused some J-Y(St)Y cable to connect some parts of the house because on short routes this works flawless too. If there where massiv problems with the wiring I would probably have somewhat different stats:
In the end every new wireway uses Cat6 or ~60m Draka - UC900 SS23 for my AP in the garden. Never had any trouble with any device if it comes to ethernet so I’m pretty sure it’s a driver/kernel problem
EDIT:
Turns out that the VIM3 successfully obtains an IP when it’s connected by a Cat5 cable to a 100mbit switch connected to my 100mbit port and works flawless in this configuration. So I suspect there is a quirk in mainline kernel / drivers that lead to an improper cable detection which leads to failing ethernet. Can someone check if Cat2 ethernet is working? This means only pair 2&3 are used/connected.
