Hello, We recently purchased two Halowlink-2 and installed them on our equipment.
One day the ground crew reported no connection between the halowlink devices. We had to do a clean reset of both devices. It might have been someone had pressed on the reset button. We are not sure what happened. We reconfigured the devices and after a few days, same issue. They were configured as AP and Client. It is an AU model. I managed to log in remotely in the AP one and did a scan of the surrounding. The client one has reverted to AP mode and its SSID name has changed. Does anyone know what is happening with the halowlink2?
We have never seen this happen randomly, and I can’t imagine how it would. In particular, changing role between Extender and AP is a very low level mechanism that should be impossible to change without someone intentionally holding the button down. I take it halowlink2-8f83 is the default SSID for the device?
You can also ask the ground crew to check the LED status on the devices (aqua status for extender, purple light on the extender if it’s connected).
I’d check with your ground crew about how they’re operating the devices. Maybe they think if something goes wrong they should press the button to ‘turn it on’ or ‘reset it’ or similar?
(if they do feel the urge to do this, they should just yank the power instead)
Hello,
We had the same issue now on a different system. Halowlink 2 was configured as AP and client and were shipped. Units were in transit on a vessel and were not used for more than 3 months. When powering up, the client has reverted to its factory default. The AP retained its configuration. Is there a possibility that a device can revert to factory due to a bug in the firmware or some corrupt data? It is being powered via USB from a microsoft windows tablet. When the tablet is turned off, the device also looses power. But I dont know if this could cause it to loose its config settings.
That sounds really annoying; sorry about this.
In theory, if the overlay partition is corrupted such that it can’t be mounted, it will act as a fresh system. We haven’t ever seen this in our testing, but possibly something to do with the tablet powering the device is causing problems. Note that in operation the HL2 should basically not be writing to the flash, so flash corruption to the extent that the whole filesystem is messed up is unlikely. Also, the MT7621 on the HL2 has reasonably high power requirements, so I expect it will drain your tablet battery a lot (in terms of existing available products, MT7628 based devices are much more power efficient).
To determine if this has happened, you would have to look at the logs from the first boot where the system occurred. You can use the management IP to gain access to the device via SSH and logread to extract the logs.
