Purple Randomly rebooting
I posted this last night https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4437291988627-Guest-network-with-Purple-and-Linksys-Velop I thought it was to do with my attempt at setting up a guest wifi network but I don't think it is, it has happened several times today.
One time after it happened, when I could finally get a connection to the network I SSHed in
and as you can see the uptime is 17 minutes. It happened again shortly after that, and again once the network was finally back I SSHed in and as you can see the uptime is only 3 minutes
Is there any particular log I should be looking at to figure out why it is restarting randomly? As you can probably imagine it is incredibly frustrating as it obviously takes down the entire network
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I've experienced a similar problem with the same solution suggested by the support folks, still waiting to see if it reboots again but so far so good. It's really odd because I used a 65W USB-C PD adapter which should be able to provide more than enough power, I've run my laptop off that and that draws far more than the Firewalla does. Once I switched it from the PD port to a standard USB port the reboots seem to have stopped, at least so far.
Is anyone else powering their Purple from a USB-C PD port rather than USB A? If so, have you experienced reboots?
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Following up on my earlier post, it's now been ~2 weeks with no more reboots after shifting from a USB-C -> USB-C to USB-A -> USB-C cable on the same power supply. Given that the only change was moving from a smart USB-C cable to a dumb USB-A one, my suspicion is that the Purple may not have the correct USB-C circuitry set up, e.g. the CC resistors configured incorrectly. Thus my question about whether anyone else is running it from a USB-C rather than USB-A power source, and in particular a Mac which is quite picky about USB-C compliance.
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Just noticed that my earlier post, about a possible hardware bug in the Purple being the cause of reboots, has been marked "pending approval" for five months now, so I assume it'll never appear. This is a repost:
It's now been several months with no more reboots after shifting from a USB-C to USB-A port on the same power supply. The Purple may not have the correct USB-C circuitry set up, for example the CC resistors configured incorrectly.
So: Has anyone powered it from a USB-C power source, and in particular a Mac which is more picky about USB-C compliance?
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Thanks. So it's the same power brick in both cases, either a USB-A port with 2.4A current (12W) or a USB-C PD port with 65W power delivery. This is why I don't think it's the power brick, because it's running fine off a 12W port but not off a 65W port on the same device.
I've run into this before on another embedded device, what had happened was that they hadn't set the USB-C CC (Configuration Channel) resistors correctly on the device, so the device was telling the power source not to supply the full USB-C power level and it was crashing and rebooting under load. When it was fed from a USB-A source it just pushed out the full 2.4A regardless and it worked fine.
This is why I suggested powering it off a Mac as a test, they're very finicky about compliance with the spec and so the fact that you can't power it off a Mac would be a quick indication of a problem, e.g. if the pulldown resistors have been omitted entirely which was the case in this particular device.
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As a followup comment, the Raspberry Pi folks found their own way of doing it wrong, https://hackaday.com/2019/07/16/exploring-the-raspberry-pi-4-usb-c-issue-in-depth/, although their way is slightly different than in the embedded device I'm referring to which simply omitted the CC resistors entirely. Point is, if powering it off a USB-A port works but USB-C doesn't, even though the USB-C port can deliver quite a bit more power than the USB-A one can, then the first thing to look for is a hardware issue in the device's USB-C handling.
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