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.
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!
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.