Radio Powered reports cable unplugged.

[gudly]

We installed a Netonix WS-8-250-AC on April 29th using firmware version 1.1.8, the newest stable release at that time. It is powering 5 UBNT Rockets and has been running flawlessly until last night. The switch stopped transmitting data and our link was reporting cable unplugged. We rebooted our link and the same problem contiued. We rebooted the switch and everything came back on. I read through the forum and could not find anyone describing a similar problem. Is this a known issue? Is there something we should be looking for? Is it possible to configure the ping watchdog to reboot the entire switch?

thanks
Doug

[sirhc]

I have never heard of this issue, HOWEVER, read below:

Last weekend we had a BAD thunderstorm roll through where my WISP is located in Lancaster PA and a Tower (Bareville Water Tower) went down in the storm.

Thinking the worst I drove out expecting to see some carnage but all we had to do was reboot the switch, no damage was done but obviously the thunderstorm did something the switch did not like.

The switch is still in service running great. See picture below of that switch which we rebooted 5 days ago (last weekend).

CLICK IMAGE BELOW TO VIEW FULL SIZE

storm.jpg (162.03 KiB) Viewed 7920 times

Was there a storm in the area?

Next time this happens (if it happens) console into the switch and see what's going on.

Now my switch that I had to reboot after the storm was locked up tight so I could not console into it.
However I was impressed that whatever it was that happened in that bad ass storm the switch held up only requiring a reboot. Now that is not to say they will always survive thunderstorms, bad things happen in storms especially if not grounded well and your tower ground is not bonded to electrical service ground which WILL cause fried Ethernet ports!

It was a NASTY storm with wind gust of 45-50Mph and dark green to black skies lighting up about every 10 seconds.

Yea I know I need to upgrade the firmware, but this is a low priority tower and I forgot about it and as you can see this is an OLD RevB board (we a re now on RevD on production units).

[gudly]

No storm in the area. Southern CA, we could really use a little rain, though I'd skip the thunder and lightning.
Unfortunately we were over an hour drive away on a Saturday night at 8:00. We called the customer who lives on the property and they flipped a switch for us to reboot our equipment manually. We just could not get in as our link was reporting cable unplugged. Strange considering it was powered by the switch. Is it possible to set up a ping watchdog to reboot the entire switch in the case that this happens again?

[MyThoughts]

Have received our first batch of WS-6-Mini units from the initial pre-order shipments and we were having a similar situation. While testing the WS-6-Mini's we kept dropping connection and packets on various ports on one of the units whenever the table was bumped, the ethernet cable was touched, etc.

I am not talking about pulling or anything, simply touching the cable would cause connectivity to drop, if you wiggled it power would drop too.

After taking a closer look at the ports we noticed the copper 'spring' pins inside 3 of the RJ45 jacks on WS-6-Mini that was having the problem were not pushed up all the way. We bent a pin into a sorta tiny fish hook and pulled the pins up to their proper position. This solved the issue for us.

We took some pictures but I have been lazy and have not sent them to Chris yet.

Might be worth taking a peak at the ports to see if this could be your issue as well.

Cheers.

[sirhc]

Have received our first batch of WS-6-Mini units from the initial pre-order shipments and we were having a similar situation. While testing the WS-6-Mini's we kept dropping connection and packets on various ports on one of the units whenever the table was bumped, the ethernet cable was touched, etc.

I am not talking about pulling or anything, simply touching the cable would cause connectivity to drop, if you wiggled it power would drop too.

After taking a closer look at the ports we noticed the copper 'spring' pins inside 3 of the RJ45 jacks on WS-6-Mini that was having the problem were not pushed up all the way. We bent a pin into a sorta tiny fish hook and pulled the pins up to their proper position. This solved the issue for us.

We took some pictures but I have been lazy and have not sent them to Chris yet.

Might be worth taking a peak at the ports to see if this could be your issue as well.

Cheers.

That is interesting, please do post the picture here if you could, we will look for this in house.

So after you did this procedure all was good then?

[lligetfa]

After taking a closer look at the ports we noticed the copper 'spring' pins inside 3 of the RJ45 jacks on WS-6-Mini that was having the problem were not pushed up all the way. We bent a pin into a sorta tiny fish hook and pulled the pins up to their proper position. This solved the issue for us.

I had a similar "problem" with one of my installers. He was very unhygienic when it came to hacksaw and drill cuttings on PVC pipe. The PVC cuttings have quite the static charge and cling to everything just like styrofoam peanuts, and he was carrying the cuttings into the RJ45 port which then caused the spring pins to hang up. It drove me nuts following after him until I figured it out.

Like you, I made up a tiny fish hook tool to fix the pins. I'm not saying you are unhygienic but that is something to watch out for.

[MyThoughts]

That is interesting, please do post the picture here if you could, we will look for this in house.

So after you did this procedure all was good then?

Yes everything was golden after we pulled the pins up.

I will keep in mind the what 'lligetfa' mentioned, but in our case it was right out of the box this way.

Cheers

[Dave]

This sounds like it was our issue, we will make a note to look into it, thanks for the feedback!

[MyThoughts]

As promised here is a the pic our tech snapped before he fixed this port (port 1 is fine, port 2 had the problem). Only one of our received units had this problem.

[sirhc]

I will make this a process from here on out that a visual inspection of the RJ45 connectors is done but that will not help any units currently in the pipeline but at least we have a FIX now that a user can do themselves of if they want to, thanks!