Spark 4 Rebooting

Troubleshooting
21

The one after the script ran was immediate. I saw the end of the script and it rebooted. It has not rebooted for ~4 hours now.

1 Like
22

Bob,

Looking at the spark 4 info in the interface It rebooted about 2 hours ago, I donā€™t know if it has done it more than once.

23

Iā€™ll make an issue to look into the memory allocation for Wifi. How does your router setup look like?

  • Single / multiple access points?
  • Repeaters?
  • Is the signal strength weak or strong?
  • Automatic or fixed channel?
24
  • Single / multiple access points? Heh, as an ex network engineer, we have several VLANs on an Orbi Pro, which results in multiple access points each assigned to a VLAN. The Orbi does not act as a router. I have an opnsense firewall between the Orbi and the cable modem.
  • Repeaters? No.
  • Is the signal strength weak or strong? Strong throughout the house and even some points outside. I have several esp32* devices on that VLAN and Iā€™ve not had any issues with them. The Pi 4b sits within a couple feet and has a very strong signal.
  • Automatic or fixed channel? I looked into this during the issues, on the AP assigned it is automatic. There is one AP on the Orbi that is fixed, but I would have to switch two VLANs and about 30 devicesā€¦ It can be done if found to be the real issue, but it wonā€™t be fun!

Iā€™ll see if I can find anything in the Orbi logs on when it shifts channels, I know it will do that whenever there is a conflict with an external device, but have not watched to see if there is a correlation.

25

That would be helpful. The Spark 3 had problems whenever the AP or channel changed. So far this hasnā€™t been a problem on the Spark 4, but after years of hunting that stupid bug, weā€™re a bit paranoid.

If reboots remain common, a next step would be to export all blocks, wipe the controller, and reflash and reload everything.

26

I will monitor it. It rebooted at about 4:01 am Pacific this morning. I donā€™t see any conflicts in the log but will keep watching it. Any idea why the spark shows an IP address on the display, but none in the spark info block in the UI?

27

On the Spark 2 and 3, the IP address comes from the WifiSettings block. The Spark 4 does not have this block. A fix for this regression is in the pipeline.

28

I had a vague memory of setting a reboot in the crontab of the pi, canā€™t remember why I added it. However, it turns out that it reboots at 4:00 am pacific. Iā€™ve removed the reboot and will see if that stops the last reboot that was occurring (since Iā€™ve only seen one each day and didnā€™t correlate the times).

When you asked for a coredump, I ran a USB cable from the pi to the power on the Spark and havenā€™t yet removed it. So that may explain the reboots Iā€™ve been seeing since the clean-up.

1 Like
29

Reboot issues appear to be resolved. Running over 3 days without a reboot. Thank you for the assist!

2 Likes