Unrecoverable corrupted flash error

RIPE Atlas
1

Hello there, I was wondering if you could look into issues I am having with my ripe probe #15145. I received a corrupted flash error a few days ago after updating my IPv6 address settings and I have tried both the normal recovery methods [0] with various working and new flash drives, to no avail.

The probe seems to exhibit normal recovery behavior, but never clears state from corrupted or missing flash.

  • SOS is sent, wait 10 minutes and insert flash drive (tried wiping fresh drives, reusing previously working drive, etc)
  • Probe acquires DHCP address, several bursts of large payload via HTTPS is received and probe restarts (observed via tcpdump)
  • Upon final reboot and another DHCP address exchange, NTP servers are hit in quick succession and no further traffic beyond ARP/DHCP is seen from the probe (Have waited for many hours/overnight).

I have had a flash drive go bad in the past and the drive was obviously bad when verifying on another machine and the normal recovery method worked to restore things so this feels like a different scenario.

Thank you very much in advance,

[0] - Troubleshooting RIPE Atlas Probes: USB Sticks | RIPE Labs

2

Just to close the loop here, I was finally able to recover my probe by flipping the network settings from Automatic DHCP to static and back again.

My original issue started when I updated my static IPv6 settings, and the corrupted flash error in the console remained a red herring. I never saw any evidence of issues with the flash drives, nor apparent issues with networking, but alas this was the final solution.