I don’t know how many of you have been around long enough to remember the problem with dodgy capacitors in RB4xx series Routerboards, but it was a thing - with us, we’d bought a batch at around the same time and they pretty much all went bang about one month out of warranty. Times moved on and the vast majority of our customers have grown and upgraded from the small Routerboards (which were absolutely fine on a slow xDSL link, but not so good on gigabit fibre!!). Today we replaced the last RB4xx (a RB493) out with a customer. It died not with a bang, but with a ‘phut’!. Not that I’m blaming this on a dodgy capacitor - the unit’s been in constant use since new and it was going to die at some point.
Anyway, just thought I’d share the memory this brought back.
I know about some RB133s that work non-stop since 2008, with capacitors still looking the same as they did at the beginning. Even RB4xx were not all bad, I have RB411UAHR at home and it’s running for eight years without a hitch. So many others weren’t that lucky, but little soldering exercise and they’re good to go again.
Not sure what your point was. Of course some are absolutely fine and of course they can be repaired (although it’ll be cheaper for our customer to buy a new one than pay our callout/time to fix the old one).
All I was saying was that this is was our last one out there and its failure brought back memories.
This post was not intended to start an argument or to start a “my Routerboard is older than your Routerboard” competition.
No point really, just memories too.
I have 2x RB450G from 2015 still alive. I was lucky?
Regards.
I’ve replaced Caps on Rb450g’s and Rb2011’s that were bulging.
But before they said “bang” or “poef”, and killed the device.
Some Rb’s are designed to run quite hot inside the case, and old-fashioned (wet) caps really don’t like that.
Usually they will last a normal lifespan though.
I’ve put some solid-electrolytic caps on them and some extra heat-sinks while I was at-it.
They’re still in every day use and rock solid, I’ve even overclocked them to the max allowed freq.
But they are no longer in frontline-duty.
I like those old devices as they never run out of storage space. (unlike all new smaller RB’s, which all have 16MB flash)
Slow CPU, sure. But great for experimentation, demonstrations, pocs etc.
Ozone