I have a power/startup problem on one of my remote sites.
The receiving station always boots back up if power cut has happened, but the ap on the same place doesnt. I can cut its power and turn it back on, but it refuse to boot properly. I have to open the box, remove the power jack, then put it back in place for the ap to boot normal. This seems very strange to me.
This happends every time I have a power cut on this location, and it happends 1/50 on other locations. Anyone have an idea whats wrong ? All stations/ap is running 333 v 3.7, but it also happened on earlier releases. The problem will eventually go away when I have my ups’es up and running, but it would still be nice to know how this can happend. -Its a 50km drive to the location, and alot of time has been wasted on this.
I would hook a serial cable up to it and watch the console as you cut and then restore its power to see what is going on when it doesn’t boot up (does the BIOS even start/show up on console?).
My personal bet: crappy power supplies/transformers. We have seen this before ourselves. At some sites where we had cheap/bad power transformers, we would have the exact same problem: the board wouldn’t boot up if you cut power to the transformer itself (unplug it from AC), but it would boot up just fine if you left the transformer plugged in and just unplugged power from the board.
My take on it was that the transformer was unable to supply enough stable regulated power to the board immediately after being plugged in itself. Thus, the board wasn’t getting enough power to start up properly and would get stuck in a “hung” state (as if a brownout had occurred). If I let the transformer “warm up” for a few seconds before plugging it into the board instead of putting a load on it immediately, then the board would boot up fine.
We fixed the problem by replacing the power supplies with beefier ones (different brand, more amperage).
And my first thought was psu too, but as Ive tested with different & better psu’s the same thing have happened. Ill check with a serial cable next time.
edit: I have 14 other locations like this and this is the only one with repeating problem..-most likely since its the most remote one
