I have a V3 probe running, #30504, which has had a lot of problems the last couple of days. The supplied flash has failed a couple of times, sometimes it could be recovered with the supplied procedures, sometimes not.
The methods tried were the ones listed on the status page for the probe:
In some cases I had to remove the MBR/GPT on the flash, did this by just overwriting the first 100 mb of the flash with 0s. I’ve also bought a NEW flash device that started out working, then failed as well. The flash devices are recognized by my PC, but they never get the probe online.
The supplied flash seems to be 4 og 8 GB, while the new I bought is 32GB, the instructions says nothing about a max size, so just got something that were available at the store. I could find no mention of a max flash size.
Is there any other thing I can try, to get the probe back up running, or is it ready for the E-Waste bin after serving for about a decade? (Maybe more maybe less, it’s been a while I don’t remember when I got it)
I just had a look, it seems the unit tried updating its software:
1-9-2024 at 01:40 and 01:41
2-9-2024 at 15:50 and 15:52
It seems offline right now, is this correct?
Removing the partition table from the device will make the probe redownload the firmware and install it, so this makes sense. Unsure why the problem repeats when you do this, except can you tell me if you tried replacing the cable and power supply?
With regards to the flash size, I think the probe only uses the first 2GB or so, so size should not matter, unless say the USB flash draws more power than the board is able to deliver.
Depends on the definition of “offline”. It were powered on, and connected to the network.
This morning I retried wiping the original flash, and it’s been powered on with this flash since about 08.15 this morning. (About 2 hours by now.) Still no change.
Currently I’ve removed the flash, and powered it on, waiting for the “no flash” tag to appear.
I don’t have another, compatible, power supply to test with. I suppose it would ideally need to be able to supply MORE power than the current, in case the new flash requires more power.
I’ve now tried multiple flash disks, none of them makes a difference. And when checking them after leaving them in the probe for a while, (more than 30 minutes each time) the files on the flash disk were completely untouched.
When trying a new USB stick you need to give it a bit more time than 30 minutes, can you leave it connected for at least 2 hours? Perhaps we can then see what’s going on
I’m pretty sure it’s been sitting with the new flash for at least 2-3 hours. But I’ve just started it with the new flash, and I’ll just leave it there for the rest of the day, and see what happens.
Also: make sure the flash drive is at least 4Gb. Larger should be ok but we mostly tested with 4 or 8Gb sticks.
If you go here: RIPE Atlas - RIPE Network Coordination Centre you can see that currently it’s not going anywhere after it boots. It’s possible it’s not recognizing the USB stick so you need to reboot it at least one more time.
As an aside- we saw so-called SOS messages (which is the probe reporting one of several error states, amongst which a failing USB stick using DNS). No connections were reported on the Atlas infrastructure, which indicates something in the connectivity area.
Yeah, the original flash, is more or less dead by now, that was the initial problem.
The reason it didn’t work with a newer flash were the fact that in between the old flash failing, and installing the new, I also configured a captive portal, that only allowed the DNS based SOS to go through, blocking all other network traffic.
At least I now know, the portal seems to work as intended.
Don’t know if it would be possible to detect the portal and report it in the SOS, but now it’s back online, doing it’s job.
