Error communicating with power supply

[sirhc]

Sent you a PM to call my cell.

[wifi442]

I installed RC7 and the error was still there however i did not reboot the switch afterward. I just rebooted and it's gone now. We'll see how it goes... I'm headed home with fingers crossed. I still have more work to do tomorrow including instalingl the grounds as well

[sirhc]

I installed RC7 and the error was still there however i did not reboot the switch afterward. I just rebooted and it's gone now. We'll see how it goes... I'm headed home with fingers crossed. I still have more work to do tomorrow including instalingl the grounds as well

Please tell me you have your tower grounding system bonded to your service ground and that 19" rack?

If not make sure your service ground is bonded to your tower grounding system.

If you are off grid then you want to make sure that your rack is binded to the tower grounding system and you connect that ground screw to earth ground.

BOND ALL GROUNDS TOGETHER AND TO RACK.

[sirhc]

We are really concerned that the switch does not have an earth ground and could cause weird issues as it (the switch) is floating and relying on Earth Ground that would be back fed through Ethernet/ESD cable.

Please provide more details such as:

Batteries

DC Input voltage

Charger


Please connect Earth ground.

Please make sure tower grounding is bonded to service ground and or rack grounding system if off grid.

Could you put up a screen grabs of the Tabs before the ERROR occurs.

Also a copy of your I2C errors from your log after the error occurs.

[sirhc]

We have been discussing this and another "possibility" is your charger is noisy and may be injecting some sort of noise into the switches power supply and messing up the onboard micro which in turn is trashing the I2C bus.

Obviously we are grasping at straws here until we get more data.

Dave and I both have multiple DC switches running trying to recreate this but so far we are unsuccessful.

[sirhc]

I am really curious if it is some sort of noise from your charger?

Mine have been running several hours no issues but my DC source is clean (AGM batteries).

I never tested with those type of batteries, are they dry cell or gel?

The next thing to look at would maybe when your charger kicks in it injects noise and the errors occur. If this is the case then there is a lot of noise coming from the charger?

Also since things are not grounded this could be the case as without the ground the system would be more susceptible to noise?

Notice the rack mount ears on our switch are powder coated as well as the switch so even if the rack is grounded (and it should be) there would be no good connection through the rack ears.

Really do not think it is hardware (well not defective anyway) as you experienced it with both units and the odds that both are bad is pretty slim.

Really want to figure this out. grrrrr.

Also what else is on this tower and in this room (thinking loud RF noise maybe)?

[wifi442]

Well we're at over 4 hours uptime on 1.3.7RC7 and so far no sign of the issue....

Here's some answers to some of your questions....

Let me know if I missed anything.

The tower and racks in the room are all grounded to the main ground buss bar outside. I haven't checked outside and looked at this in a while but it was like that when we set up this site back in 2010. I will verify.

I didn't have time to bring the wire and parts to ground the chassis to the rack and buss bar. I will be back in the morning to finish that part of it. Before today, this site has been running since early 2010 with POE's and a Tripp Lite Inverter Charger.

I brought a total of 3 WS-250-12-DC Switches with me but only needed two. In the end all three exhibited the problem so It's very doubtful it's a problem with the switch. The first one had the problem and then I swapped it for the spare. Then the spare did it, and then right before I left the other one did it too!

It's a very busy mountain top with several towers and also next tower over there's a 25kw FM broadcast station (Google says it's 70 feet away also appx 75 up on a tower). There's some other locked cabinets in the room that I share. I'm not sure what they are. Possibly some kind of paging equipment.

The charger: http://www.samlexamerica.com/products/P ... px?pid=495

That same model charger is running at 2 other sites powering WS-12-250-DC with no problems for about week or so now. I have also been using these same chargers for years at other sites. They work really well and I've never had one fail yet

Batteries are 4 AGM 110AH Made by Universal battery wired in series/parallel to make 24v. They are appx 5 months old


I don't think there's anything wrong with the switches. I'm just wondering what might be causing this.

These switches are the best thing I've added to my wisp in a while! When something comes along this good there's bound to be a bump or two

I'll let you know if the issue comes up again.....