Re: net6501: doesn't start if not first unplugged for 8 minutes

Hi Dries,

This is a longstanding problem .. in my experience my board was rock 
solid for a couple of years until I experienced a power failure and then 
it failed to boot. It was a brick for over two years, but the last time 
I tried it did boot and so now I'm keeping it as an emergency spare.

At the time I thought that the combios might be stuck in a loop waiting 
for some hardware to initialize, and upon more reflection I suspect 
that's probably the case.

If it the loop/jump was no-oped one might be able to get the board to 
boot sans effected hardware .. I'd thought about disassembling the bios 
and looking for that loop and replacing the JMP with a NOOP but didn't 
have time at the time to mess with it and so bought a PC-Engines board 
instead.  I'm sure that if Soekris folks were still developing combios 
this would be a trivial change to make and I'm sure they have no 
shortage of dead boards to test it with.  :)

I've often thought that If a sick board would at least boot without the 
network ports  it might still have limited use in some other capacity as 
opposed to being a complete brick.  Might also be possible to write a 
special kernel driver to 'whack' it into shape once up and running.

--Andrew


On 2017-03-20 5:40 AM, Dries Verachtert wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 20, 2017 at 10:11 AM, Julien Cigar <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I think there is definitively an hardware/BIOS issue with the board, I'm
>> confident that the problem doesn't come from the power supply or an
>> overheating from the CPU.
> Ed, Jay, Grizzard, Freek, Julien,
>
> Thank you for all the information. I bought the board +/- 2,5 years
> ago. The Soekris website mentions 3 years of limited warranty so I'll
> try to do an RMA. But in the long run, I'll probably buy something
> else because I prefer to have a router/firewall that will still work
> after a reboot.
>
> I've actually spent a lot of time fiddling with different serial
> cables/ports and trying all combinations of serial speed/parity/stop
> bits before I figured out that it only started again if I kept it
> disconnected for some time. It would be nice if Soekris could document
> this somewhere on their wiki...
>
> Kind regards,
> Dries
> _______________________________________________
> Soekris-tech mailing list
> [email protected]
> http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech