On 10/14/24 07:14, Ian Chilton wrote:
Hi,I've got a few PCEngines APU2 boxes I use as routers at home. I updated 3x of them from 7.5 to 7.6 a few days ago. Since then, one of them has randomly spotted responding 3x times in just over 48 hours when it was stable for months previously. On opening the serial console, I see it sat at a 'dbb{0}>' prompt. Thankfully I am able to type reboot there and it comes back up fine. It's not logging anything the logs go from standard routine jobs like syslogd restarting to booting up. It's also sat doing very little - it has a PPPoE connection to a VDSL provider, a PF ruleset and is just doing standard firewalling and routing. The other 'identical' apu2 boxes I upgraded seem fine so far. Are there any known problems? - or anything I can do to troubleshoot further?
Three identical machines, two behaving, one misbehaving. Looking at the OS is probably the wrong path here. Sounds like a clear hardware problem to me. My bet: power pack. I had something like that happen recently myself -- stable machine, I believe the problems started when I did an upgrade on it, it just wouldn't stay running after that. I was about to chuck it in the trash and replace it (I have plenty of others of these systems, and they were all fine), and I looked at the power pack I had on it...and realized how anemic it was. I think it was one I did a "let's see what I can get away with on these things". Replaced the power pack, it's been solid ever since. SPECULATION: The power draw during an upgrade is a lot more than the normal day-to- day power draw, due to the install kernel not having all the power management code of the production kernel. So...a borderline and already stressed power pack may just decide that's a good time to finish getting flakey. Nick.
