OpenWRT PoE - how to switch PoE to other port

Hardware Questions and Recommendations
1

Hi all,

I have just bought an OpenWRT One, and before I bought it I read discussions on this forum (like this one) which said that you can switch PoE between the WAN and LAN ports by editing a config file.

However I can’t work out how to do this. All I seem to be able to do is reassign a port to the WAN or LAN interface but this is not what I want to do.

I have a 10 Gbps switch that can link down to 2.5 Gbps, and so I’d like to connect that to the 2.5 Gbps port to get maximum speed, however that switch is not PoE. I have a PoE switch but it is only 1 Gbps, so I don’t want to connect that to the 2.5G port otherwise I’ll only get 1G on it.

So I don’t care about the WAN/LAN configuration, but I do care about moving PoE to the 1G port so I can power it from the 1G PoE switch, leaving the 2.5G port free for a non-PoE 2.5G link. Typically in this case I would assign the 1G link as a management port on a privileged VLAN and use the 2.5G link for actual data, so having two Ethernet cables to the device is not a problem as I already do this anyway.

What am I missing in the docs for how to swap PoE to the other port?

2

Can't move only PoE feature between ports.

3

As frollic implied, the PoE hardware is electrically tied (by the PCB design) to the 2.5 GBit/s port, if you take the PCB photo as example

  • one PoE module soldered in
    the vertical daughter module, in the bottom/ middle, between the ethernet ports
  • the 'wires' (PCB traces) going to the 2.5 GBit/s port (only)

You can switch around the lan/ wan assignment however you like it, but the PoE feature only exists on the 2.5 GBit/s port (and the hardware description explicitly says that as well.

4

Thanks for confirming. Yes I looked at the specs page too and under “Power Supply” it doesn’t say that PoE is limited to only one Ethernet port. In the intro it says “2.5 Gbps WAN connector” but since I found a few posts here saying WAN and LAN could be swapped I thought they meant the hardware ports, rather than the software interfaces since you’ve been able to reassign the software interfaces for almost two decades so I thought that was a given. I had assumed there were jumpers on the board or perhaps a software option to control which 8P8C was routed to the PoE module.

I suppose my bad for not confirming first.

5

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