Lost control of my OBi

[Stewart]

After successfully making a routine configuration change via the OBi's web server, rebooting and testing, I attempted to undo it.  Upon hitting Submit, the "reboot required message" appeared, but the top panel with the Reboot button was blank.  Thinking that this was just a browser glitch, after refreshing the status page, the Reboot button reappeared and I pressed it.  Unfortunately, the device did not reappear on the network.  Rebooting the router did not help.  Has anyone seen this issue before?

I'm remote from the device and will ask someone to reset it.  I'm assuming that we would first try cycling power, then the factory reset button.  Is there a better procedure?  Anything else that they should be prepared to do?

[RonR]

I've had OBi's go squirrelly on several occasions after making routine changes and rebooting.  Usually they go into an endless reboot loop and don't get far enough along to get the Ethernet port up and running.  Usually pulling the power for a few seconds straightens them out, but a couple of times I've had to resort to factory defaults and reloading everything from a backup file.

[Stewart]

Usually pulling the power for a few seconds straightens them out, but a couple of times I've had to resort to factory defaults and reloading everything from a backup file.

Yep, I finally got a friend to visit the apartment; a simple power cycle brought it back to life.  However, now I'm nervous about making a frivolous or unimportant change to the config.

Given that you've had this trouble, too, it seems that the OBi is much less robust than other ATAs in this regard.  IIRC, Linksys ATAs have a hardware "watchdog" that causes a power-on reset, if the firmware fails to kick it periodically.  Does the OBi lack such a mechanism?  Or, does the firmware have a state where it can't talk on the network, yet it still keeps kicking the dog?  I hope it's the latter, so a firmware update can fix this issue.

[RonR]

I would bet the OBi employs a hardware watchdog timer, but I don't believe it's kicked based on being able to talk to the network.  An OBi with its Ethernet cable unplugged doesn't constantly reboot.

Watchdog timers are usually kicked from key places in software that should be executing with regularity.  It appears the watchdog timer is started following a reboot, but the OBi gets stuck in a fatal loop somewhere early on, causing the OBi to repeatedly do a warm boot.  Whatever the problem is, it takes a cold boot to fix the problem.  This would seem to indicate something that's initialized only on a cold boot probably needs to be moved so that it's initialzed on both a cold and a warm boot.