we have a 50' tower that had a soekris 4511 board running a modified version of pebble linux. The system worked great for nearly 2 years. We upgraded the system to a soekris 4521 and bridged both pcmcia interfaces to have a 2 sector site. The 2 sector system works great except for one problem: it randomly dies every 1-4 days and never comes back! (until tech recycles power)
The lockup symptoms are as follows:
1) blinking link light at switch where eth0 is plugged in.
2) No response from any interface - wired or wireless
3) System log is set to issue "mark" line every 10 minutes, but nothing is ever written to the log during this time.
The system has a working & tested watchdog timer.
What has been tried (not in this order):
1) cron job that pings wireless backhaul and does a reboot if no ping answer after 10 min. (didn't ever run)
2) Thinking it might be a power problem we replaced power supplies.
3) Not trusting our POE ethernet cable, we used second Cat5 cable to create DC power plug, and plug directly into motherboard. 4 wires for + and 4wires for - on the DC cable.
4) Added gnd rod & cable to improve tower grounding. (remember though, this single sector system work fine for quite some time)
5) Swapped out the 4521 motherboard.
6) Created bench test system. This was an exact duplicate of the tower system without external antennas.
Wireless laptop ->2 sector system (wireless backhaul link)-> wireless router-> wired laptop
In this test system our test AP runs without any wired connections, as we use it in the field. We ran flat out repeated copy scripts for 3-4 days, and transfered approx 40G at about 3Mb/sec (way more than field load!).
Never saw test AP lockup, its uptime was always correct. This actual 4521 motherboard is now on the tower, and we still see the problem.
Any suggestions?
Thank you kindly,
Marshall
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