Did my alix 2d3 just up and die?

dmc_lat47

I purchased an alix 2d3 appliance from netgate a couple of years ago, with pfSense preinstalled.

The firmware version is 1.2.3.

It's run silently, reliably since i purchased it… absolutely no hassles, just worked. Until a couple of nights ago. The network just went down. After looking at all my switches, i narrowed it down to the alix/pfsense appliance. I recycled power, and things came back up.

A day goes by. It goes down again. I recycle power again.

A half day goes by .... recycling restores the network.

The box doesn't stay up more than a couple of minutes after powercycling now. When it's down, the machines on the green network can't get to internet, and neither can they get to the pfsense admin page.

So, I'm trying to decide what to do. Could it be the CF card? Memory? do I have to buy a whole new appliance? Maybe someone has just hacked the box? How can I tell? I do notice that even during the times the box is unresponsive, the lights on the green and red interfaces are still flashing, like stuff is being exchanged between lan and wan... but I don't think it's me!

Can anyone describe to me what I can do to start to narrow down the problem? I'd happily buy a new box, but if i've been hacked, it may not do any good... :(

thanks in advance

stephenw10

The first thing to do is hook up a serial cable to the box and login to the console directly. That way you will know for sure if it has really crashed.
If it is really crashing the first thing I would check is the power supply.

Steve

cmb

@stephenw10:

The first thing to do is hook up a serial cable to the box and login to the console directly. That way you will know for sure if it has really crashed.
If it is really crashing the first thing I would check is the power supply.

This. If it is actually crashing, i.e. it's not responsive at the serial console, then it's most likely the power supply has flaked out. I don't hear much of the boards actually dying, probably less than 10% of failures like that, but hear about power supplies dying on occasion. That comprises probably 90% of the ALIX hardware failures I've heard about.