pi-star freezing/locking up

[Ki6anr]

I have an original ZumSpot on a Pi Zero W I bought from HRO a couple years ago. It has worked flawlessly for the past several years until recently. It now freezes/locks up randomly from minutes to hours after starting. It requires the power being unplugged to restart it.

I have tried:

-using my home wifi and also my phone hotspot to see if it was a network issue

-left it connected to a reflector, left it disconnected to a reflector, both ends in freezing

-tried multiple power supplies including original iphone brick, high powered ipad brick, and a 25w Anker power supply, all end in freezing

-disabled wifi-powersave

-tried rr.quadnet and also newer irc4 quadnet server, both result in freezing

-moved hotspot to various places in the house

-updated pi-star to latest version

-tried brand new sd card (sandisk)

-tried reflashing sd card eith clean install

I’m not sure what else could be causing this to happen. Pi-star runs perfectly fine (when its actually running) until it ultimately freezes randomly minutes to hours later. When I first purchased the zumspot I believe it was running a 3.x version of pi-star and never had a problem with freezing/locking up. All versions of 4.x.x seem to be doing this now. Not sure if it is a problem with pi-star, the board itself, or a combination of both. Just know it never did this before and it does it now. Can the old Pi Zero W boards not handle newer pi-star versions now? Something I’m missing?

Anthony
KI6ANR

[M1DNS]

Vers 4.1.** is compatible across all pi foundation hardware. So that wouldnt be an issue.

Usually this type of thing is related to power or sd card.

One other thought have you been updating the devices firmware as youve been updating its pistar releases?

Sent via smoke signals from my SM-G935F M1DNS (Admin)

[Ki6anr]

my hotspot laid undisturbed for nearly a year… however I would walk by frequently and see it transmitting away being it’s happy self. About 2 months ago I started getting back into D-star heavily so I started tinkering with it again. Ran updates and started noticing my hotspot freezing and crashing. It was originally running on a 16gb Sanddisk card. Tried reflashing with a brand new install of pi-star 4.1.5 and it did the same. I purchased a brand new Sanddisk 64gb card, fresh install, same. I tried doing updates after a fresh install and still froze. I don’t get it…

updating the firmare of the rpi zero w? i dont believe i have…

“ Earlier RPI's, including the zero, DO NOT HAVE firmware in upgradable permanent memory, they have no permanent memory at all, expect a very small piece ( a few kilo bytes) of boot code that has been "baked in the silicon", and cannot be changed, and a few BYTES of one time programmable PROM with a pre-defined use.”

[M1DNS]

MMDVM Firmware. Nothing to do with the Pi.

Sent via smoke signals from my SM-G935F M1DNS (Admin)

[Ki6anr]

how is accomplished?

[KN2TOD]

Some other things to consider:

Is your QTH experiencing occasional power sags or surges? Pi0's are notoriously fickle about power and any voltage variations can corrupt its memory quickly. Granted, its tough to catch this since we usually don't notice lights flickering or think much about it if it happens once in a blue moon.

Have you looked at your disk usage, particularly temp storage?

Periodically issue "df -kTh" and look at the percentage usage of the /var/log directory; typically be less than 10% but if it's creeping upwards, you might have a runaway condition that is filling up the logs, usually syslog. Investigate by issuing a "tail -n 100 /var/log/syslog" command and look for something amiss there. Also look at the var/log/pi-star directory and see if those logs seem unusually large.

[Ki6anr]

I will check that but I doubt it. It has locked up as quickly as 10 minutes after a fresh install so I dont think logs have had enough time to stack up. It’s also on a 64gb card… but thanks for one more think to investigate.

I dont think I am having any boltage sag problems with the house grid itself. I have even tried powering the pi off of a power bank thinking something along those lines as well. Thanks for the pointers.

After work I will investigate upgrading the mmdvm firmware and check out your log suggestions. Keep the thoughts coming if anything else pops up. Thanks again.

[Ki6anr]

M1DNS,


Also, I know pi-star does a “nightly cleanup”…. at what time does this usually occur and does it typically result in a reboot of thr system? I got my zumspot to survive last night overnight for about 8 hours without a “freeze” but I did notice when I checked it this morning it had disconnected from the reflector I had it set on… assuming it rebooted at some point. (I do not have it set to automatically join a reflector on boot up currently while doing all this trouble shooting).

Anthony

[KN2TOD]

Temp storage (tmpfs) is maintained in memory and not on the mSD card. /var/log/ is fixed at 64m irrespective of the SD size. Admittedly, I don't know what happens when a particular directory fills up but I assume the system simply stops - no more room to log a message to say there's no more room!

Ironically, because of your post, I started looking at my systems a little closer and found two of them with runaway conditions that could lead to lockups - one of which I known about for a while (overflows in the RF queues) and one which is new: wifi validation errors. (One system is currently at 70% - pretty high!) Still digging into this.

So ... waiting to see what you find in investigations and whether our situations are related some way, somehow.

[Ki6anr]

KNT20D,


What is the “fix” when you are finding these runaway logs? I’m not great with linux and is going to be a challenege to even find/view these logs tonight after I get home.. Hopefully thebcommends you suggested are helpful, however what should I be looking for (what size of a file, etc) and when I do.. how do I get rid of them?