I have a stash of RB411's/RB133s in my drawer and most of them have broken Ethernet ports. The ethernet ports usually break after heavy weather, or major power surges/spikes. (I can connect to the board through the wireless interface)

This tells me that I may have an earthing problem, which is very puzzling to me, as we make sure during installation that our earthing is correct, so is the equipment that we use, enough?

The equipment we use to earth our RBs are as follows.

The enclosure
Shielded RJ45 plug
Shielded Cable
Earthed POE

We wind the earth wire from the shielded cable around the shielded plug, on both ends of the cable. The one side plugs into the RB, and the other side plugs into the POE. The POE plugs into the home electric system, with a three prong plug(Live, Neutral, Earth). So provided the home electrical system is earthed correctly, or if the POE is connected through the UPS, then the earthing should be fine. But I still get RBs with broken ports. It seems as though the problem is in actual fact going through the client PC, through the POE and up to the RB. Is this possible?

Is it possible to replace the ethernet ports on the boards?

maybey they did what I did one time... I had tenants that kep abusing the free internet I gave them... Not for total data, but for scanning IP addresses for hacking purposes. so, what I did was took an old extension cord, cut off the end, attached one wire to one exacto knife, and the other to another knife, then put one blade on pin one, then started to put the other blade on every other pin, until I seen a little spark....

True sense of power over ether.. 120 Volts AC, fried thier router, and my hacking buddies did not hack anymore.

BTW This was after telling them 4 times that my ISP had called me about this port scanning issue... I think I gave them fair warning.

When you test your board is it powered up by POE? or barrel connector?

If powered up over POE and you can connect to it via wireless, have you tried just plain ethernet connectivity with ether 1, and/or power with the barrel connector and try connect by ether1?

I would assume that if the POE works, and ether connectivity doesnt that the chip is fried, probably hard or impossible to change. Possible cause static electricty from inside going through the ethernet cable?

I have had a RB532A, and a couple RB112's in the antenna, not grounded to case, nor grounded with cat 5 shielded. Bolted to a metal post, which was bolted to the side of a wood house, using standard cat 5e, non outdoor. This set up has been up for YEARS, probably around 4 or 5 years, I have never had any problem, other then the cat 5 fading from the sun. Not to mention the metal post wiggles too.

This tells me that I may have an earthing problem, which is very puzzling to me, as we make sure during installation that our earthing is correct, so is the equipment that we use, enough?

Check the AC source is this stable and AC waveform clean from any spikes or "hash" noise present?, consider this a cheap switch mode power supply may not have sufficient filtering?

We wind the earth wire from the shielded cable around the shielded plug, on both ends of the cable. The one side plugs into the RB, and the other side plugs into the POE. The POE plugs into the home electric system, with a three prong plug(Live, Neutral, Earth). So provided the home electrical system is earthed correctly, or if the POE is connected through the UPS, then the earthing should be fine. But I still get RBs with broken ports. It seems as though the problem is in actual fact going through the client PC, through the POE and up to the RB. Is this possible?

Have you considered your earthing is a overkill?, I would only earth one side of the cat5, Ok have the enclosure earthed but i wouldn't run a earth from enclosure to RB board,floating earth is not a bad idea for dc power with long run of power leads used.

The ethernet ports usually break after heavy weather, or major power surges/spikes. (I can connect to the board through the wireless interface)

When you say "break" please clarify, are the ethernet ports physically broken pins blown off or pcb track ?

I have encountered an issue where ethernet port was present but not passing traffic and wireless interface was working OK, but it was caused by moisture ingress at the rj45 socket on the antenna.