Wireless works great. Wired can't get to work

Question

I have an Extreme (N) that I bought just after the added Gigabit ports to it. I also have an old Express connected using WDS to boost the signal in the back of my house. I started having issues w/ wireless latency in the back room so I ran an ethernet cable from the Extreme to the Express. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the express to work (ie. communicate w/ the extreme) over the wired wire. If I plugged my macbook into the same cable and it works immediately (I get an IP address and internet connectivity). The odd thing is that when I plug in the cable, it shows a link light on the extreme so I know that it's communicating somehow.
I ended up moving the express back to WDS and just moved it closer to the extreme and that has helped the latency.
But now I want to hook up my Samsung Blu-ray player to that wired line and again, I cannot get the Blu-ray player to talk to the extreme. It will not get a DHCP address, will not communicate w/ the internet if I assign a static IP address, and when I try to ping it from my macbook I get 85% packet loss.
I would have thought this was a bad player if I hadn't had the previous experience w/ the express doing the exact same thing.
Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Hey DaddyPaycheck
It may not be about the "auto-negotiation" thing.
"auto-negotiation" is controlled by the hardware at boot up to check the NIC state. If a cable is connected at both ends, it detects a line voltage else ignores the NIC. If line voltage is present it starts testing certain pins #'s to see what's at the other end.
Test order ... WAN Port, LAN Port, Cable type Crossover, Cable type Straight, Client to Client, Client to Server, WAN to WAN, LAN to LAN, WAN to LAN, LAN to WAN, Negotiate a speed of the cable connection else BAD CABLE & ignores the NIC completely. Good Grief
This is totally unnecessary if you use the correct cable type & kind. Sorry if I sound like a broken record but too many posters keep blaming the SL upgrade but that's only the end result of new network requirements. Even I was able to use a Cat 5e @ 1Gbit/s with Leopard but SL drop it to 100 Mbit/s. I knew they changed something, found what they did, hacked it to make it work but the packet loss was incredibly. Switched to Cat 6 cable, now all is find and dandy.
For whatever reason each subsequent release of OSX seems to make the Mac "pickier" about the quality of the Ethernet cables it will work with. You can't even imagine how many posters scoff at me when I suggest a new cable.
Dude, I've seen some of your replies in posts around here. I look for them for sheer amusement.
I have had many instances throughout my career where a cable will work fine on one machine and not on another. Since a new cable is often only a few bucks it is a cheap, easy fix when it does work
An client called me with DSL problems the day after I set it up & I still laugh him. He moved the DSL modem so he could see the blinking lights but he rolled up the cable with twist ties. He didn't believe me when I told him about Crosstalk, I had to prove it to him.
No mater what you do some people just don't understand.