I have a number of RouterOS devices that seem to reboot a couple of times a day. All of them are built on x86 hardware of different types (different motherboards, ethernet cards, etc). The Routerboard devices that I have don’t seem to have this problem and stay up for months and months. Its only the x86 devices that reboot constantly. The log file only says “router was rebooted without proper shutdown”. It doesn’t say anything about the watchdog or anything else.
Here’s some potential causes (although they may be way off):
Hardware issue - strange since they all have different hardware, but it could be a general x86 issue.
Configuration issue - maybe I need to be firewalling something that I don’t maybe I need to install a package that I don’t have.
IRQ Sharing issue - it’s possible that since the Routerboards assign a different IRQ to each NIC and the x86 devices that I have tend to all share IRQ 10 for multiple NICs/Devices that the sharing causes a problem.
OS issue - RouterOS may have a problem somewhere that I don’t know about and I don’t know how to solve.
Obviously, I’m at a loss as to how to troubleshoot the issue since it seems so random and there’s no information in the logs that would point me anywhere. Does anyone have any great ideas of where to look to find the problem? Thanks!
It is strange to note that I found another post (http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/reboot-all-on-the-chain/9370/1) where a guy had a similar problem. He explained that routers would reboot in series - one right after another in a chain. After looking at mine, they are doing the same thing. He was able to fix it by turning off connection tracking. I can do that on all but one of my routers since it’s running NAT.