[atlas] Probe offline

On 07/03/2016 15:24, M. Piscaer wrote:

Finally got it up.  USB was fired.  Threw it away. 

Thanks to all,
Hank

> Hi Hank,
>
> On https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8oF0MaoUlQ I saw that you can use an
> new clean USB disk. When the usb disk is FAT formated, the probe will
> use that new usb stick.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Michiel Piscaer
>
> On 07-03-16 14:09, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
>> On 07/03/2016 10:49, Gert Doering wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Mon, Mar 07, 2016 at 10:39:47AM +0200, Hank Nussbacher wrote:
>>>> What does that mean?  I can try reseating the USB again, but if that
>>>> doesn't work, it could be the USB is fried?
>>> Try the USB stick in a "normal" PC and see whether it can be formatted
>>> there.  I recently had one of mine completely break - the stick could be
>>> seen, but it was empty and all write access failed.
>> I pulled the USB stick and tried formatting it.  Even though it says 4GB
>> Sandisk, I could only get it to 1GB.
>> So I opened a new probe, extracted its USB stick and stuck it into the
>> probe as well (unformatted).   Still off-line.
>>
>> I went to our "lights out" facility 3x today - a 15 minute brisk walk
>> across campus and don't have time to
>> go there again. 
>>
>> At home it is far easier to play with these things then it is when the
>> probe is installed as close to your network core as possible (which is
>> usually at a LO facility).  I know exactly how you feel!
>>
>> -Hank
>>
>>> I'm not sure what the Atlas v3 does with its USB stick, but this is the
>>> number one problem issue...  maybe a new firmware version could be designed
>>> that has more advanced flash handling (like, ubifs instead of "normal"
>>> filesystems) and falls back to "not use flash if the flash is broken".
>>>
>>> What I see with my probes is that the aim of the flash buffer ("we can 
>>> store measurement results if we can't upload them to the control server
>>> due to network outages etc." -> less probability of result loss) is 
>>> actually backfiring into "extended downtimes of probes due to USB breakage
>>> of probes in locations where you can't just-so swap the USB flash"...
>>> (two of my 3 v3 probes have had virtually no network outages since they
>>> are operating, and the central servers also had few outages - but both
>>> have been down for weeks because I just had no time to go out, buy a 
>>> new flash drive, and *drive over* to replace it - once again)
>>>
>>> Gert Doering
>>>         -- NetMaster
>>
>>