Balance 310 restarting 5 times within 18 hours, how to prevent?

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

One of our three managed PepLink Balance 310 devices keeps restarting itself.

The restarts occur in quite a high frequency:

  1. Fri Dec 06 04:19:10 CET 2013
  2. Fri Dec 06 08:59:01 CET 2013
  3. Fri Dec 06 16:16:47 CET 2013
  4. Fri Dec 06 17:44:03 CET 2013
  5. Fri Dec 06 21:41:00 CET 2013

Between restart #4 and #5 the Firewall setting Intrusion Detection and DoS Prevention has been changed from “Disabled” to “Enabled”.

The Operating Environment seems well within range:
Temperature minimum last 24 hours was 22,5 °C and 25,0 °C was the maximum.
Humidity minimum last 24 hours was 26,7 % and 38,2 % was the maximum.

Firmware: 5.4.9 build 1564
Hourly data rates are up to 8.7 GB.
Daily traffic rates are up to 139 GB.
Monthly traffic rates are up to 3 TB.

What can be done to prevent this frequent number of restarts?

2

This BA310 is a paid replacement for a BA300 with issues.

The replacement took place in February 2012.

The issues with the BA300 (at the same location) were:

  • stop transmitting SIP packets for a specific VoIP service
  • reboot after SIP telephone calls (using the same VoIP service)
  • reboot after setting up PPTP connections
3

Our support team is taking care of this case via our ticket system.

4

Support team:

Would you please remove Application QoS rule for “All Supported Streaming Applications”, “IPsec” and “PPTP”? The default priority is normal and these three rules are not necessary. But we found that this may causes the reboot issue. Please remove these three rules and see weather the issue can be solved or not.

Spelling comment: weather -> whether

5

Result is that the BA310 still does reboot at random.

At least it did once within 3 hours after applying the reduced QoS rules (each QoS rule where “priority = normal” has been removed).

6

And the next spontaneous Balance 310 reboot occurred, within only 90 minutes.

7

After removing all QoS rules the spontaneous reboots occur at larger intervals, but the first one did already occur after approximately 9 hours: Sun Dec 15 10:56:37 CET 2013.

8

And the next not requested reboot was at: Sun Dec 15 15:05:46 CET 2013.
This interval is a little more than 4 hours.

9

Another unwanted Balance 310 restart occurred at Sun Dec 15 16:03:45 CET 2013 (little less than 1 hour interval).

10

Would you please try our latest 6.1.0 beta firmware? The firmware link has been included in the email.

If this firmware cannot resolve the issue, it is apparently related to hardware issue for Balance 310.

11

Firmware upgrade fw-b210_310_hw2_hw3-6.1.0b19-build2457.bin fails: after reboot, the Balance is still running version 5.x firmware.

12

After a second try, the Firmware upgrade to version 6.1.0 succeeded.
But after reboot I am locked out: “You need to unlock your new firmware before it can be fully functional.”.

13

After the Balance 310 firmware upgrade to version 6.1, our watchdog monitoring (ICMP, 10 second interval, 9 ping retries) detects that the Balance is not answering any of the ICMP request within the 90 second interval. This interval was also used with version 5.x firmware.

Watchdog monitoring is now increased to a 15 second interval and 14 ping retries, before powering off, waiting 10 seconds and powering back on the BA-310.

14

I did revert to firmware 5.4.9 build 1564 and disabled the remote ICMP ping packet watchdog service.

15

Even with Balance firmware v 5 and the remote watchdog disabled, there are unwanted BA310 reboots.

I am now switching back to Firmware 1: v6.1.0b19 build 2457.

16

Even running firmware 6.1.0b19 build 2457 one out of three Peplink Balance 310 hw v2 devices keeps rebooting at random (with the external watchdog disabled).

Current uptime: 12 minutes.

17

The BA310 and firmware 6.1.0 still does randomly reboot the router at intervals between 1 and 4 hours.

18

We suspected it is hardware issue, and we are arranging RMA in this case over our ticketing system

19

Our previous BA300 was also experiencing random reboot issues.

See Ticket #728409, this forum Peplink | Pepwave - Forum, and e-mail dated 28th January 2012:

Quote: …the Balance router stops transmitting SIP packets for 1 specific provider (configured 3 times) every 13 days. And even after the Peplink 300 has been cold booted within the last hour, the BA300 reboots itself, after a 1m25s phone call using the voipbuster service…

20

The Balance 300 has old generation and different hardware / software. Therefore, they would be different issues.