Robert Beal

Max Value HomePlug matching problem… Fixed

// January 29th, 2010 // Linux, Windows

For Christmas (2009) I was given a pair of Max Value 200Mbps HomePlug units, presumably from Amazon. Out of the box they worked, and still do, perfectly. I was so impressed by them, I quickly ordered another pair from Amazon within a few weeks, and this is where my problem began.

The first pair, lets call them A and B, work fine. The second pair, C and D, also work when I switched them with A/B that I was already using. However all four wouldn’t work together. A or B wouldn’t work with C/D, and C or D wouldn’t work with A/B.

Problem is, being Max Value, they come in a white, plain box with a CD. None of which, from looking at it, I bothered keeping; and probably should have done. Both pairs had the same model number printed on them (), but most likely are slightly different versions/revisions.

I googled around, and posted on AV Forums, but couldn’t find much or get any responses.

I eventually came across a Devolo application that worked at finding, and configuring my HomePlugs. It comes in a Windows, Mac, and even Linux flavour on the downloads page. I of course went with the Linux version. Here are the steps:

1. Download the app or in a terminal…
2. wget http://www.devolo.co.uk/downloads/software/software-dlan-linux-v5-1.tar.gz
3. tar -zxvf software-dlan-linux-v5-1.tar.gz
4. sudo apt-get install g++
5. cd software-dlan-linux-v5-1
6. make

Or, download the compiled files, I’ve made on Ubuntu 9.10 x64.Those steps should have the app downloaded, extracted, and “make” called in order to build it. It should make two runnable apps, “dlanlist” and “dlanpasswd”.

Hook yourself up to one of the HomePlugs. Open up a terminal window, and make sure you are in the folder that contains the apps.

sudo ./dlanlist

For me this output the following:

Type    MAC address        Mbps TX/RX       Version/Product

local   00:1F:A4:28:26:FA  —.– / —.–  INT6000-MAC-3-3-3305-00-1988-20080209-B Intellon

remote  00:1F:A4:58:18:63    0.00 /   0.00  INT6000-MAC-4-0-4011-00-3430-20090501-FINAL-C

local   00:1F:A4:58:18:64  —.– / —.–  INT6000-MAC-4-0-4011-00-3430-20090501-FINAL-C Intellon

remote  00:1F:A4:28:26:FB    0.00 /   0.00  INT6000-MAC-3-3-3305-00-1988-20080209-B

As you can see the revisions/versions of the two pairs are slightly different, INT6000-MAC-3-3-3305-00-1988-20080209-B and INT6000-MAC-4-0-4011-00-3430-20090501-FINAL-C.

I then used the other app, “dlanpasswd” to set the password for each device.

sudo ./dlanpasswd 00:1F:A4:28:26:FA MyPasswordHere

I applied the above command to all the MAC addresses listed from dlanlist, so that they were all configured using the same encryption password. After doing this all units, A, B, C, D, worked together! I did find one hadn’t worked when I went to the pc connected to it, but I ran the command from that machine (locally) and it started working (as opposed to applying it remotely).