Netonix Forums

Hello

I have been experiencing a high failure rate on WS12-250-DC and WS-MINI units, in fact the failure rate is so high even the agent has stopped supplying the Netonix products and will no longer cover any warranties. Anyone having these problems? I feel cheated. Sure some of the failures may be surges but the kit should be able to handle a surge or two, the previous kit did not fail as often and we only changed because of features and variable voltage

We have an RMA process which is outlined here: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1259#p9343

If the unit failed we repair it and return the unit to you free of charge. You may use postal mail to save money but we will return the unit to you via DHL Express 3-5 business days.

However if the unit is damaged we will also repair it for a fee. We do most repairs at cost and often lose money on a repair.

Most of our RMAs are not from failures but from surge damage, ground current, water intrusions from cable, reverse polarity on DC units, and so on.

If you feel your unit failed then request an RMA #, ship or mail the unit to us and we will tear it apart and determine if the unit failed or was damaged. If the unit was damaged we provide a full report on what we find along with pictures of any visible damage we find.

Considering we have sold over 70,000+ switches and we are on RMA # 2836 which is about 4% total requests for RMA repair.

Now consider that about 90% of our RMA repairs are from the following in order of most common:
#1 Ground current
#2 Shorted cables
#3 Water intrusion from cables
#4 Electrical surges
And so on...

If you look at the # of RMAs that are not damaged as described above our RMA % of failures is less than 1%.

Most manufacturers would simply say those types of damage are not covered under warranty and tell you to buy another switch.

We do repair these units and we provide a report that instructs the user on how to prevent some types of damage most commonly poor grounding.

As I said if you feel your unit FAILED then request an RMA # and send it back to us for repair. If the unit failed we will repair and return to you free of charge.

People will tell you that if a unit fails we do repair if free but if it is damaged we will not repair for free but we do repair it.

I have had switches submitted for repair and the user thought they did it and we discovered it failed and fixed it free.

We try to be very honest on this but I will not fix any unit that was damaged for free, sorry.

But until you actually send a unit to us to look at we can not tell if it failed or was damaged.

STEP #1 - RMA IT

We are seeing extremely high failure rate as well. It has gotten to the point we no longer reboot the units. In order to reboot the unit and not blow them up we have to power down all the ports or pull the cables from all the ports then reboot. When we follow this reboot procedure we have not had a unit fail. Our units are directly connected to the batteries with a fuse in line. I think there is some type of inrush current that fries the units. We are looking at putting a DC to Dc converter in between the batteries and the netonix to reduce the inrush current to the units. In our lab testing we have yet to have a unit fail when we put a dc to dc converter in line between the unit and the batteries.

d2b wrote:We are seeing extremely high failure rate as well. It has gotten to the point we no longer reboot the units. In order to reboot the unit and not blow them up we have to power down all the ports or pull the cables from all the ports then reboot. When we follow this reboot procedure we have not had a unit fail. Our units are directly connected to the batteries with a fuse in line. I think there is some type of inrush current that fries the units. We are looking at putting a DC to Dc converter in between the batteries and the netonix to reduce the inrush current to the units. In our lab testing we have yet to have a unit fail when we put a dc to dc converter in line between the unit and the batteries.

This is not recommended, negates the purpose of the WS-12-250-DC, you would be better to use the WS-12-DC and use an external 48V-54V power supply then.

I appreciate your attempt to diagnose but what your saying is not valid.

Have you RMA's any of these units and if so what was the tech report on the failures?

Do you have any RMA numbers I can reference to see what the techs found out when they tour your unit down?

We understand this negates the purpose of the WS-12-250-DC but we are trying to find a solution so we can stabilize the 50 units we have out in the field. Currently, if we reboot a unit with POE's on and radios connected the netonix will fail.

We are in the process of RMA'ing the qty (10) units. When I have the numbers I will post them .

d2b wrote:We understand this negates the purpose of the WS-12-250-DC but we are trying to find a solution so we can stabilize the 50 units we have out in the field. Currently, if we reboot a unit with POE's on and radios connected the netonix will fail.

We are in the process of RMA'ing the qty (10) units. When I have the numbers I will post them .

Well the RMA # on units we have not looked at are no help.
I was wanting to look up RMA #s to see what the Techs found.
I would suggest you get RMA #s, send them in and let us look at them.
We will be able to then know what is the issue and let you know.

We will provide a full report as to what we found, who knows, maybe you had extremely bad luck and there was a bad batch but we can not tell until we look at them.

I can tell you there are well over 10 thousand of these units in the field working every day hooked directly to battery banks.

But like I said after we tear it down and look we will KNOW what is going on instead of guessing. If they failed we will fix and return and if they are damaged somehow we will provide a report on how and what to do to prevent it.

Ok great we are excited to figure a way to stabilize the units... Some of the units were able to be recovered using the factory rest as described in your RMA documentation. This leads us to believe that the OS hard crashed. These units were all using LACP Laging we are looking at removing the lagging on the units.

d2b wrote:Ok great we are excited to figure a way to stabilize the units... Some of the units were able to be recovered using the factory rest as described in your RMA documentation. This leads us to believe that the OS hard crashed. These units were all using LACP Laging we are looking at removing the lagging on the units.

I use LAGs both STATIC and LACP all throughout my WIPS network with no issues?

I explain this here: viewtopic.php?f=30&t=452#p2961

We currently have removed all of out LACP lags and are using static laging. once we removed LACP we are seeing much better stability. We are using firmware 1.5.1rc4 and are connecting to a Mikrotik 317

d2b wrote:We currently have removed all of out LACP lags and are using static laging. once we removed LACP we are seeing much better stability. We are using firmware 1.5.1rc4 and are connecting to a Mikrotik 317

Read the release notes we just released v1.5.1rc12 and confirmed and fixed an LACP bug that started with v1.5.1rc2, try v1.5.1rc12

AND ALWAYS CONSULT THE RELEASE NOTES ON ISSUES BEING FIXED