My SRW2008 "drops" the link to other devices, what to do?

[ml_cisco_support]

Hi,

I have a SRW2008 that has worked flawlessly for a few years. It is installed as the main switch in my LAN.

Recently I enabled jumbo frames, but regretted and disabled it again.

During the disable process, I was asked to click a webview reboot button to restart the switch, what unfortunately resulted in an infinite reboot loop.

I found a fix online, and did as described, logged in using serial connection and deleted a "config" file. Now the switch booted again.

However, not sure if it is a result of the reset, but now the switch drops the link to connected devices.

Typically within an hour, I can't get any traffic through the switch, at least on some ports. If I can still access it on my workstation port, I can simply open the webview, disable the port, on which, I want to communicate (out) and and re-enable it. Voila everything works again. Same result if I unplug the device on the outgoing port, and plug it in again. It just not acceptable to do this 10 times a day.

The device connected, that typically is "disconnected" is a ReadyNas NVX. I have seen the same behavior for my workstation-location 5 port switch that is also connected to the SRW2008. The link lights simply turns off on my 5 port switch, and I have to unplug it and re-plug to get a link again.

It could be a issue caused by timeouts due to no traffic, or could be related to the config reset, I have no idea.

What am I to do from here?

Cheers,

-Michael

[David Hornstein · Accepted solution]

Hi ml_cisco_support

Maybe a long shot, and my calleagues may disagree.

I like the SRW2008 as well, I use a SRW2008P in my applications, and would hate to loose the use of it.

It might be interesting to perform a software upgrade even with the currently available release of code, just to refresh the operating system in flash memory.

Then perform a factory reset, to initialize registers and the configuration.

It might be a waste of time or it might not.  My thoughts are that something got corrupted which can happen to flash memory.

Just a thought.

regards Dave

[ml_cisco_support]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for your effort. I have been away all week, but now finally had some time to try it out.

Didn't have much confidense in it, but it was worth a try. Since the flash image is compressed, and extracted at boot and run in RAM, I would think that any corruption would be detected during the boot sequence.

Anyway I gave it a shot, and it turned out to be a bit of a nightmare, here a quick log:

The IE webview was now even worse than it ever was before, and as you probably know, no other browsers work at all. The login screen was about 5 min to load, and login never succeeded. Instead I loaded up the serial console and tried to figure out how to reload the FW image.

The only way I could figure out how to do this was to install a TFTP server and do a "remote" upgrade. I got started ok, but it was REALLY slow, and I aborted when it was about 70k done 15 minutes later. A rough estimate would be a 12 hour upload had I not aborted, and I did not have the nerve for that. Unfortunately the firmware was now broken and I spent about 4 hours trying to fix the broken image by uploading a new copy using the console and XMODEM filetransfer. After trying a few terminal programs and lots of XMODEM settings all with file transfer failure, I decided to give hyperTerminal a go, before giving up. It work in first go like a miracle, and after another factory reset, I was now ready to test the switch again.

All serial console communication runs fine, and there are no errors, warnings or other signs of malfunction. However the network interfaces are even worse than ever before. Cant get the web-view login screen to load at all, and ping tests have about a 50% failure and a 2ms average responsetime for the successful cycles.

It feels like the cpu is running about 1kHz, I can't figure whats wrong but I think it has to be hw related.

I will give cisco/linksys support a chance to help out, but expect the box the be broken beyond repair.

Thanks for you time anyway,

-Michael

[David Hornstein]

Hi Michael,

SRW2008 comes with a 5-year limited hardware warranty with return to factory replacement.

Give the Small Business Support center a call, sure sounds like a hardware issue, but you never know what the TAC folks can do.

Yep agreed, give them a try.

Regards Dave