SG-2100 Led indicator don’t show correct status
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Hi,
I’ve recently bought a couple of Netgate appliances, SG-2100 and SG-6100
Both great products and I would have expected that the power down leds would behave the same.
On the SG-6100 when I halt the system the LED switch from blinking blue to amber. This is perfect and I can safely unplug the device.On the SG-2100, when I halt the system the led continuous to blink blue, LAN ports continue to blink. Basically there is nothing that indicates that it has shutdown, only thing is if you try to ping it from another device. I’ll deploy a SG-2100 on a remote site, 1200km away with non technical staff. So I need to be able to trust the LED, to guide staff when it’s safe to unplug whenever there is a need for it.
What can be done on the SG-2100 to change the LED behaviour to work same way as the SG-6100?
FYI, I have UPS attached, so when I halt the system prior to a site shutdown, I need to be able to power down the UPS safely before draining batteries. For this I need to know when the SG-2100 is safe to unplug.
Thanks in advance,
RogerI read this tread but didn’t find a real answer.
Re: SG-2100 Does not power off -
@linq I don't have the thread handy but there was a discussion about how the LEDs are controlled on the different devices. If I recall correctly there is a hardware controller on the SG2100 (maybe 1100 and 3100 also) for the LEDs, so software has less direct control of them. Basically last command sent to the hardware controller is "blink blue led at rate x", system shuts down, OS hits halted state. By the time you hit halted, the LED controller can't be talked to so can't change the characteristics.
If you can't plug the UPS cable into the SG2100 and run something like apcupsd or NUT to provide the control of shutdown, I would simply plug the console cable in and wait for the "system is halted" message. In theory, you could plug the console cable in, then trigger the shutdown from the GUI, then time things and make a note of LED behavior. The time to shutdown should be fairly consistent, so if it takes 5 minutes to see message halted since trigger, you could add 2 minutes and power it down at 7 minutes from trigger.
But I like the console cable in to see. -
Yeah it would be cool if there was a command to send to the LED controller eg "in 10 seconds, flip the power LED to orange" so that could be issued as a final command just as the system was about to power off.
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@luckman212 Agree, I would like the led controllers to have a heartbeat so that if nothing is heard back in X seconds flip the led to something else than blinking blue. As it is now the flashing LED is as dumb as an LED on battery.
Hope we can get some attraction on this as I’ve seen earlier treads just end without any feature update.
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@mer Thanks for the explanation, I understand more of the underlying logic now. However anything more than reading LED status on this remote device is too much to ask for, trust me on this.
And I would assume that when I need to know the status the most, then I’m out of remote capabilities as well. I hope we are more that agrees that having a LED that flashes without any real reflection of operational status is quite useless.
Thanks the the extensive answer!
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Yeah, we have looked into this, I agree it would be nice to see the LED indicate the system is safe to de-power. Unfortunately there is no way to make that happen as I understand it. The LED controller cannot be set to do that. And if it could it might still do it even it the system had not finished shutting down.
Steve
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@stephenw10 Would it be possible to set it to solid blue when you halting the device? Then it's up to the user to wait accordingly until it's safe to unplug the power. That would at least give more assurance that just have it flashing regardless of state.
I think this behavior would be the best option seen to the options that exists, or I'm I overlooking something here.
Have a great day!
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Probably best in a feature request: https://redmine.pfsense.org/
Though as I say we did look into it before, it's likely to be pretty low priority.
Steve
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@stephenw10 Regards from Italy. I'm an owner of Netgate SG-2100. After last firmware update my diamond blue LED, is fixed, static on (i.e not blinking anymore as previous behavior). We've done some diagnostic control with positive results.
Haved you changed some LED meanings behavior ?Kindly regards.
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@angelo42 I seem to recall a similar post in the last couple of weeks, that said it returned to normal after a reboot...?
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Hmm, there shouldn't be any changes on the 2100.
Does it still flash all three correctly during boot if you reboot it?
I've never seen the LED controller stop responding on the 2100 but potentially it might require a compete power cycle to clear if it did.
Steve
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@stephenw10 Hi all, after first reboot i recovered the normal LED behavior (LED pulsating as heartbeat).
Thank you so much !
Best regards
Angelo -
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