Here’s an interesting one…
I have a Crossroads connected to one of my offices, and as it’s a temporary network setup we have a few network cables laying on the floor. I was just vacuuming up near the equipment while one of the computers was streaming a TV show, and the stream died when I was near (within a foot) the network cables. When I looked over at the switch the traffic had stopped.
I went to login to the router and it’s not responding, a few minutes later it comes back up, error message was “router was rebooted without proper shutdown”. I figured it was another random unexplained RouterOS crash, and a few mins later I went back to vacuuming, I left a ping running on the screen and after getting close to the cables (not touching) it went down again.
At this point I’m baffled…the RBCR seems to freeze up when I move the running vacuum near it’s network cable, then the watchdog reboots it after the time delay. I also checked a RB493 a few floors down from this office, it’s unaffected and still showing a 2day uptime since I last rebooted it. It’s PoE cable is right there with the cable going to the RBCR.
Setup details:
RBCR is on the roof with about 50ft of cable between the PoE box and the outdoor enclosure, it’s simply doing point to point back to my data center next door.
RB493 is two floors down and has about 175ft of cable on the PoE connection and is routing about 3-4Mbits of traffic back to the data center via the RBCR.
12v PoE going to the RBCR.
24v PoE going to the RB493.
Typical Cat5e UTP cable.
All equipment related to this is on a 2.2Kva UPS.
Vacuum is a 12A Dirt Devil MVP, just your typical upright vacuum, yes it was on a different circuit than the network gear.
1ft-2ft seems to be the distance near the cable required to crash the RB.
So yeah, that was a random issue to find. If any of you out there are having issues with RB Crossroads rebooting and they happen to be near high electrical loads, move the cable away and see if it fixes it.
I’d love to test this more, and I have some STP cable here I want to try, but I’m carrying VoIP traffic for two clients over this link till I finish installing fiber so I can’t play with it much.
