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I blew the fuse and vendor fixes it for free

Posted on za 21 september 2024 in hardware

While I was away this summer, my wife complained that Internet connection stopped working. I had her switch to 5G, which was fine for a couple of days. On returning, I noticed that my fairly new Deciso Opnsense appliance stopped responding. As I was busy with other things at that moment, I switched back to the old pcengines apu4 based setup, putting the Deciso firewall in storage.

A while later I found the time to look at it. In the meantime we started preparing to move to a new house, so I figured I would fix the Deciso device and use it in the new home onward. Looking through the box of stuff I filtered the list of power bricks down to the single one that was powerful enough to drive this device. Rock solid approach right?

So I booted the device with a serial/USB connected and soon was greeted byt the boot prompt. That seemed OK, but soon enough, ZFS errors everywhere! As I had not changed anything for months on the device, I figured it was hardware/SSD failure. So I screenshotted the output and got in touch with Deciso.

ZFS errors on the console

Some mail back and forth went by. Then I tried booting the device again, planning on doing a reinstallation using a USB bootstick. But the device would not power on. Not a single blip....

Contacted Deciso again, filled in the RMA and took the device to their office. I live like 500 meters from one of the owners of Deciso and their office is not to far away for me.

I was welcomed with coffee, but soon somebody commented on the powerbrick that I brought along. Did not seem standard. Ah too high a voltage! So that was one me. But the owner was a sport and fixed the device personally, all while providing a new power brick. Fuse replaced, opnsense reinstalled, new power brick. No cost, all service!

Great stuff :-)

Confused about the powerbrick situation, I checked my photo library for unboxing pictures. And yes, sure, somewhere along the way I mixed up power adapters. At this time we still have both the old and the new home with some off our stuff in it. So I have no idea where the original power brick ended up .... mystery!

The new device just unboxed with the proper power brick behind it

What originally went wrong the storage of the unit also remains somewhat of a mystery, the SSD itself was not replaced. Most probably a power glitch at the wrong time.