Hi everyone. Never in my life have I had such difficulty to get a computer to show up with an IP and connect to it via a browser. Here's what's going on:

1. I plugin a vanilla Unraid on my desk, stick in HDMI, keyboard, boot it. I sign in to the GUI. All good. Network is DHCP, I leave it at that. RJ45 is in port 2.

2. Now I unplug it, move the Unraid to the floor behind me. On the same USW-60 unifi switch and a different cable I plugin port 2 into a different port on the switch. Boot. I see an IP in OpenWRT, but here it comes: I can never reach the webGUI! Only difference here: no keyboard in USB/at all!

3. So, power off, try a different port, or a different cable, or a different port on the switch, same outcome, I see an IP but I cannot reach the GUI. The ports on the Switch all have the same configuration, VLAN 1, as did the port I connected to on my desk. Still no keyboard in USB.

4. Next, I power off, move the Unraid back to my desk, plug it in, get an IP, and boom: I can access the webGUI
   

   I have wiped network.cfg and network-rules.cfg countless times to iterate over this in cycles and I for the life of me cannot explain why this is happening. Unfortunately, I have no keyboard and Screen on the floor behind me and not available for a quick and easy move to work out what's going on. I am desperate, I can't explain this. Unifi ports don't show anything wrong. Port configurations aligned and checked to be exactly the same as that 1 port on my desk.

Who can tell me what is going on here?

Edited October 9, 2025Oct 9 by dmindfuse

The ip should be the same whatever port of the switch you use.

It would be VERY unlikely that the dhcp server gives out to the same host just because it is on a different port.

Also, it should be easy to test, just put the box on your desk, go to the switch and use a different port there. nothing should change.

I would almost guess that your box is not capable of running "headless". If there is no monitor attached, it stays inside the bios and never boots up totally (just a guess).

Edited October 9, 2025Oct 9 by MAM59

@MAM59 , thanks for the input. It's a bit more complex still. Even on my desk, after I boot, I get a webGUI, but it seems I can not login after the first successful attempt, which leads me to believe, something is in fact crashing. Normally I would expect a keyboard getting plugged into a USB port to allow me to type away shortly. But in this case, on-screen nothing happens, suggesting the box hung itself up. Tere has to be a simple explanation. For example, the network... this is config it creates is not correct. It creates a bond with 4 nics, but I only have 2 and I only use 1. It activates ipv6 and not ipv4 dhcp, yet it gets a v4 ip... And STP is set to no, even though on unifi switches this is activated. So i tried to manually change the network.cfg, but that only seems to make it freeze up after boot, my guess. Dear me, I hope I can get a refund if this leads nowhere, but I will keep trying a bit more.

sounds like your box is running amok.

Are you sure you did not push the bios over the limit?

Overclocking? Too high Memory Speed (run MEMTEST to be sure!) ?

@MAM59 , thanks, no actually. ;) After losing a fair amount of hair I decided to go through the configs one by one and lo and behold, I observed that - for whatever reason - the NTP configuration I thought I saved, was not there. So, my server configured with the right time zone, but wrong clock was running out of sync and I hadn’t noticed it. This caused DHCP to behave unlike what I expected. To be in sync or not to be in sync. So that was one. The other one I hadn’t mentioned, where the dns did not resolve, I solved by removing the static IP and relying on static assignment via dhcp entirely. It seems unraid doesn’t register with dhcp when configured with a static IP… or I might yet have done something else wrong… 😑 Anyway, it’s running now. I’d like to try LACP, but I’m a wee bit scared I re-enter the void 😂.