Random restarting

General support for the Pi-Star System
Post Reply
VA3UG
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue May 21, 2019 2:27 am

Random restarting

Post by VA3UG »

So here's a good one that I can't seem to wrap my head around. First off, running Pistar on a Zumspot w/RPi Zero W, PiStar 4.1.6.

Every day (approx 10pm-ish) my Pistar node is restarting; the Pi itself isn't (as is evidenced by checking uptime via console access). There are no cron jobs anywhere that are set up to restart anything...

Thoughts? Any ideas where else to look?
KN2TOD
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2018 6:36 pm

Re: Random restarting

Post by KN2TOD »

Two thoughts come to mind here:

1) power problems: voltage sag, something in or near your QTH, something that is on a schedule of some sort. (Pi-zero's are particularly sensitive to voltage variations - mine seem to boot on their own from time to time.)

2) you've got the pistar-remote option turned on and someone is hitting your HS with the "magic" code to cause it to reboot. Maybe a rewrite rule that is generating the right code?

Ok, the second one is a little fa-fetched, but hey, since the syslogs are gone after the fact, the only thing we can go on here is speculation.
VA3UG
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue May 21, 2019 2:27 am

Re: Random restarting

Post by VA3UG »

Voltage drop was my original thought, however, the Pi itself isn't restarting (uptime does not reflect a reboot), it's *just* the Pistar software that causes the --CLOSE-- message to appear on the screen and then the thing kicks back in. dmesg also shows nothing either.

2) Pi-star remote is not enabled.
KN2TOD
Posts: 270
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2018 6:36 pm

Re: Random restarting

Post by KN2TOD »

Ah. The picture is clearer now.

I've seen that seemingly "stray" message recently on one of my hotspots too: I ended up issuing a "sudo shutdown -c" to cancel the scheduled close but as I recall, I also had to do an actual reboot to get whatever flag it set to be cleared as the message popped back up 24 hours later. Best guess is that some system application (in Raspbian, not Pi-Star) is getting updated in the nightly processing and gets "stuck" some how because a flag doesn't get cleared or set properly, don't know. It's one of those "fix-it-and-forget-it" type problems - you don't know why it happens, it doesn't make any sense, but you know the "fix" is good because you don't it see again.

YMMV
Post Reply