I’ll start off by saying that I’m new to Mikrotik and am already in love with you guys! I’ve setup my RB 411U with a Huawei E226 (like E220) 3G modem in no time and it works great. Except for one minor detail.
Almost every time (I’d say 9 out of 10) I shutdown the router, disconnect the power, and boot up again, the usb port (under system) comes back invalid. A reboot rectifies the problem.
This basically means that every time I power up and boot, I have to reboot. It’s not really really a problem. Just a little anoying.
Any one else experiencing this? Has anyone come up with a solution?
Are you using the latest RouterOS version?
Can you reproduce it almost every reboot?
Maybe you could provide remote access to that router?
Please contact support@mikrotik.com
It’s basically like this. Every time I shut it down and boot it up again, I have to reboot because the usb port shows invalid in red. After the reboot, everything is fine. It happened once or twice that I didn’t have to reboot. Why that was, I have no idea.
I have a theory however. I think it’s the modems fault. I believe it needs a couple of seconds to start after receiving power. I don’t know exactly how much time after starting to receive power, the RB provides power through the usb.
My theory then is that if the modem starts talking to the RouterOS only after it already boot up, it won’t recognize it. And since a reboot doesn’t cut the power to the modem, it will recognize it without problems.
Maybe you could provide remote access to that router?
Gladly. I’m a little low on bandwidth (EDGE) on site, but I think it will do to run winbox remotely, telnet in or whatever.
I have the same problem with a 411U an Huawei E220. Starts up correctly 50% of the time, other times exactly what you describe and this requires a trip to the site- Very frustrating.
Oh… That’s going to be a problem. The board is in a remote location and the only internet access is per GSM. Hence without the modem on the board, I have no way of providing access. I’d had to remove the whole thing from the tower and bring it in to the city…
If you guys really need it, then I’ll do it. But if there is any way around it, let’s try that first. I can provide access via the modem and I can send the support file in if that helps.
I have a theory however. I think it’s the modems fault. I believe it needs a couple of seconds to start after receiving power. I don’t know exactly how much time after starting to receive power, the RB provides power through the usb.
/system routerboard settings set boot-delay=9s
I have no experience with this setup, but maybe a boot delay would give the usb enough time to boot. I think the default is 2 or 3 seconds. Hope it helps.
Steve0, that’s a great idea! I haven’t been on site for about a month now, for which reason I haven’t followed up on this. I’ll give it a shot when I’m there again.
Damn… Was hoping it’d work. I’ll give it a try though jcem, to see if we get the same results. But like I said, I don’t know when that’s going to be. I’m burried with work and college and don’t have time to make the trip (200 km).
And no, it’s not supposed to come back invalid with nothing attached to it. At least not in my experience. With nothing connected to the usb it should boot fine every time.
The same settings being the delay? How much did you use? I’d give as much delay as it takes the modem to blink once (you know, when it sees the network it blinks once, else it blinks twice in quick succession) plus 5 or 10 seconds. If that doesn’t fix it, it’d kill my above described theory.
But like I said, it’s now going to be a while before I’m there again.
We have been having this same problem with a RB433UAH and a Sierra Wireless U598. This is with ROS 4.6. The problem we are seeing is that the USB port is either being reported as invalid or is completely undetected after EITHER a warm reboot or a power reset.
If we hot plug the modem into the USB after the RB433UAH is already running, all is well, but after a reboot, it is the same thing. I would confirm about 90% failures to detect. It seems like a problem with the USB hot plug driver. It does not behave the same across multiple boards. Some detect and boot fine and others have this issue.
So what we are seeing is that the Sierra Wireless 598U USB modem will sometimes be detected and sometimes not. There appear to be two different conditions: the USB port completely not discovered and the USB port being partially discovered but being shown as invalid.
Sometimes the system will recover and load the driver from a power reset, other times it will not. We tried the boot-delay setting, but it appears to make no difference.
The only action that seems to always fix it is to hot plug the 598U while the board is powered up. Again, this is why I think it must be related to the USB hot plug driver. The modem is just not being enumerated properly.
It is not a power issue as we have seen this with 12, 18 and 24 V supplies with and without miniPCI cards.
The modems will work 100% of the time with a windows PC and the Sierra Wireless Watcher application and windows driver.
We really want to make this work on the 433 as we have a need for multiple wireless interfaces. Any suggestions?
So, it appears to be that the 598U has a timing issue with the USB driver. About 30% of the time the USB port is missing, 20% of the time the USB port is invalid, and 10% of the time the driver appears to load, but then we see that the modem is constantly resetting the link.
We have tried setting the boot-delay up to 9s. No difference.
We have tried every possible init string.
We have 4 modems and they all behave similar. With Windows drivers we do not see this issue. With Linux on x86 we do not see this issue. It appears to be unique to MT.
It would be very helpful if there were a manual way to restart the USB hot plug driver, or otherwise scan the USB bus for the modem. The only way we can restart the modems is with power reset.
We have a large opportunity for a public safety application and need to get this fixed asap. We have tried the U760 with same results.
When we do get the modem to load, it stays up reliably and will reconnect, but the boot up process is where the issue is.
We continue to test the Sierra Wireless 598U and 760U with the RB433. We have concluded that the modems take just slightly longer to power on and register themselves as an active USB devices than the RB433 takes to boot. So the OS does not recognize the USB port on the modems properly.
Solutions that we think would be required:
Allow for longer boot-delay interval
Allow for rescan of the USB ports for devices
Allow for power off/power on of USB ports in order to simulate USB device insertion
