I compiled my own version of openWRT for Metarouter according to the instructions found in the Metarouter wiki article. I used this metarouter image with no problems at all on a 433AH (mikrotik firmware 3.30). When I tried the same image on the 450G (both 3.30 and 4.0 firmware), I get the following strange behavior:
Metarouter starts fine on router boot
After anywhere between 5 and 45 minutes, the router reboots itself
I turned on logging and saw “system error - router was rebooted without proper shutdown by watchdog timer” (Kernel panic from RouterOS??)
Sometimes the meta router also locks up on the 450G and I have to manually disable and re-enable the metarouter (effectively rebooting it) to get it working again.
Has anyone else seen these problems in this configuration? I tried Mikrotik 3.30 and new 4.0 firmware and still same strange issues. Any ideas on how to correct this?
can you get more information about your router? i am trying to reproduce it on my test RB450G with 2.23 boot loader 4.1 RouterOS and it does not hand or reboot.
CPU frequency is 680MHz.
I’m not sure on the boot loader version. Is this only visible on the serial interface? I’m not local to the unit as I work off-site, but I can get someone to serial into the 450G to find this out if you think it is important.
I’ve noticed that problems seems to happen when I’m doing network I/O on the Metarouter. If no network I/O on the metarouter happens, it is very stable. But, once I SSH into the metarouter and start doing a top or other command line tasks, it only lasts a little while before lock up or reboot. One thing I did differently just a few minutes ago was to re-upload the image by scp. I previously uploaded by FTP and I’m not sure if it was in binary mode. Obviously, this would cause big problems. I’m trying the same tests on the new metarouter now and will post results.
I also haven’t tried the default WRT build that Normis posted in another thread (I think Normis posted it). I am still using the build that I built.
Tried the pre-built image posted by Normis. Made sure I used scp to ensure binary transfer. Same issue. We were testing some VLAN settings on the same board and it ended up in a perpetual boot state.
We attempted to reload firmware via netinstall, but no success. Stuck on the message “sending offer”. We tried to flash it with the 4.0 net installer (per other forum posts), but same thing. After taking power off for a while and powering it back up, it was able to boot again. We did a memory scan from bios and it didn’t appear there were any memory problems. Then, we reset all configurations. I also found a way to upgrade the boot loader from the forums. So, I did that. Previous version was 2.20 and I upgraded to 2.23. Then, re-configured router from scratch.
After all this, same issue. Random reboots when doing I/O on the metarouter on 450G. Just to check, I did the same thing to a 433AH and no issue there.
Should we keep trying to netinstall or does this point to a hardware problem?
BTW, exactly what I’m doing when this happens:
In winbox, I have console open and running top
In an ssh session remotely, I am executing a shell script:
#!/bin/sh
while true
do
clear
date
df -h
uptime
sleep 3
done
If I let these conditions go for 40-60 minutes, router will reboot at some point in there. I’ve also noticed that router will reboot during these conditions if some other random events happen on the router.
The meta router is set up on a bridge called “wrt”. IP address on wrt bridge is 10.20.1.1/30. IP address on meta router is 10.20.1.2/30. Gateway and DNS are set up on meta router. Dstnat is used to get to meta router ssh remotely via tcp port 3333.
I was also able to get the 450G to reboot when simply letting top run in that same image (while leaving winbox open to monitor it) and disabling the metarouter interfaces and metarouter bridge altogether. It happened in about the same amount of time…last time, it took about an hour.
Tried a different 450G board w/ the posted image (not my compiled one) and same result. I’ve tried everything I know to try and still get this problem.
I did update for 4.1, bootloader 2.23, watchdog disable and this problem persist.
I did downgrade for 3.30, bootloader 2.20, watchdog disable and this problem persist.
I did downgrade for 3.28, bootloader 2.20, watchdog disable and this problem persist.
I have a RB493AUH with 3.28 version and 2.20 bootloader and this problem not occurs (yet).
Started top from command line on console inside my wrt metarouter (previously posted image by Normis).
The metarouter had no network communications enabled, so it was not doing network i/o
About an hour later, it locked up and didn’t reboot…had to kill power and restart manually
I also tried to import the pre-built wrt metarouter image onto a regular RB450 and got an immediate reboot. After reboot happened, the metarouter listing was not there.
Thanks for the input Soho. At least I know I’m not doing something wrong with the Metarouter.
Interesting is the problem, as you mentioned … The system (Mikrotik) freezes and back without me doing anything. You lose access to Mikrotik, it seems that the interfaces simply stop responding. When the system returns, there is no log, as if nothing had happened.
In one of these frozen I turned off the RB and when I turned on, the image of OpenWRT simply disappeared (deleted).
i am running RB450G with normis posted OpenWRT image and its uptime is several hours already and nothing has hanged. i am using that router as gateway.
OpenWRT image runs fine until you start doing things with it. For example, we run top command from OpenWRT, leave console open and router will reboot itself (kernel panic) within an hour. If we aren’t really doing anything with OpenWRT, it is fine and doesn’t reboot. I also just got the box to reboot itself in about 5 minutes (console in winbox was closed) running top on the WRT image in an SSH session from a remote client…give it a try…
The system is currently not in production anywhere…is a development system (we are developing some custom html pages inside the metarouter…at least we hope to if this problem can be solved.)
General specs
The board itself is a standard RB450G
256MB memory
CPU: MIPS 24K V7.4 @ 680MHz
520MB flash HDD space
No other devices are attached (I don’t think there are any ports to do this anyway)
Running RouterOS version 3.30 (tried 4.0 and 4.1…all do the same thing)
Boot loader version 2.20 (although on another board we tried, 2.23 was installed)
Installed packages
We are primarily using these as hotspot gateways (basic NAT only), so if there are any suggested packages that we can remove or disable that may fix the problem, please suggest
calea
routeros-mipsbe
advanced-tools
dhcp
hotspot
ipv6 (disabled)
ppp
routerboard
routing
routing-test (disabled)
security
system
wireless
user-manager
Metarouter specs
openWRT image (posted by Normis)
memory 16 MB
disk size 128000kiB
Do you need any other information? If you need, I can send a support.rif as well.
Things I’ve tried that don’t fix the problem:
Underclocking doesn’t help.
Cannot be forced to produce.. (doing a bunch of stressful tasks in the openwrt does not reboot it.)
never writing to the disk subsystem has no effect.
Openwrt never shows any kernel errors.
I’m kinda concerned about the metarouter feature.. just doesn’t seem to be very important.
Hopefully Mikrotik can reproduce our problems and fix in the next RouterOS version, but I haven’t heard that they will do so at this time. IMHO - Almost seems like a memory leak somewhere in metarouter causing kernel panic and router reboot…
Did also have problems with Metarouter on my RB750 (i have 4) and RB411U when i add a metarouter (just RouterOS) and both with and without network on it.
It starts up (can see it using metarouter console), then i get disconnected from Winbox and i can’t get in again…
Just gets random reboots after i got kick’d out from the box.
Even using telnet or ssh i can’t login, and typing username takes some time before i see what was type’d and same on serial on RB411U.
Did also try with OpenWRT with 8 and 16MB of Ram same result.
So did need to netinstall both before i could them running again!
I was using 4.1 and 3.30 running the latest firmware.
And making a Supout was a no go since i could not login after this!
metarouter by default assigns minimum amount of RAM to the system - 16MB that might cause problems with it on boards that have 32MB of ram..
About Metarouter on RB450G, that have plentiful storage and RAM to run several metarouter instances - Normis posted image hanged once, last week. after that - metarouter has ran bash script posted in one of previous posts (http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/rb450g-openwrt-metarouter-strange-problem/32210/5) non-stop every second.
From last post about configuration - i do not have calea package installed. Maybe you could send e-mail to support with details - how we could get connected to that board, since my RB450G at this moment seem to be resilient to this problem.
