May I ask Peplink and other experts in this forum, do the Soho and Balance routers have the ability to dump memory for analysis by Peplink? I am asking this question because I see that Peplink spends a lot of time trying to duplicate problems, for instance stating on current Surf Soho issues that they can’t reproduce yet and therefore can’t proceed with a fix. (I originally posted this comment in “SOHO: Lockups & Reboots”, but I am reposting since there was no response.)
Microsoft Windows has that capability. It is certainly used to deal with challenging problems that aren’t easy to reproduce. My company’s software has the capability too.
If a watchdog timer can reboot the router, then the watchdog timer should also be capable of dumping memory for analysis. In my opinion, it should be always be collecting a minimum amount of significant information (ours does). Call stacks for all threads (is there a thread deadlock?), status of ports, the status of buffers, significant recent activity (for example status changes in ports), etc.
Having developed memory dumping and “crash” dumps (defined as the minimum amount of significant data) for our software, I know implementation can be tricky. This is because the dump software must be careful not to use any parts of the code which may not be reliable. For example, perhaps writing to the event log might not be working anymore, necessitating another approach such as saving the information somewhere to be finally written as part of the restart.
I assume having a memory dump triggered by the watchdog timer to be analyzed, full or abbreviated, might help solve the current Surf Soho lockup problems as well as other problems.