Problems with C2801

[Pawel Lenart]

Hi

I'm sorry if I'm in wrong forum. I put my discussion here because it was in IP Telephony for a while but noone answered. I moved it here.

I recently bought used C2801 and currently it have C2801-ADVENTERPRISEK9_IVS-M IOS and I'm using it for CUCME study / lab purposes. As it's pretty loud I'm switch it it off over night and when I start it sometimes it goes to ROMMON mode. Usually restart is fixing this problem and today I was using it and suddenly it restarted and info recovered from console you can see attached.

When I check version I can also see message:

Router uptime is 8 minutes

System returned to ROM by error - a Software forced crash, PC 0x60439088 at 17:49:39 UTC Fri Feb 24 2012

System image file is "flash:/c2801-adventerprisek9_ivs-mz.124-22.T.bin"

Before I load different firmware can someone experienced in technical info tell me what is happening. is it IOS or router itself? What can be wrong? How Can I fix it? Are these two problems related (going to ROMMON and rebooting)?

In attached file I also highlighted 3 lines in red. I haven't seen them in different routers and it usually takes 30-40 seconds to go through them which of course is causing router to boot much slower. What is that about?

My register is set to 0x2102

Thanks very much for your help.

Regards

[Peter Paluch]

Hello Pawel,

I personally see three most probable causes of your problem: more RAM is required; IOS bug; hardware error.

You are using the most feature-rich version of IOS which is understandably very memory-hungry. I see you have 256MB of RAM that should be more than enough - but I am still somewhat cautious in this respect. Most certainly, you do not need ADVENTERPRISEK9 for CUCME experiments. The ADVIPSERVICESK9, or even IPVOICE, should be sufficient for your needs. The most recent 12.4T version is 12.4(24)T6 and I would suggest moving to that version - preferably using ADVIPSERVICESK9 feature set.

Moving to another version and feature set should hopefully eliminate the issues with RAM size and IOS bugs - let's hope that this is not a hardware problem. What I see in the included file are messages commenting on exhausted memory and corrupted memory pools. Usually, this is caused by an IOS bug.

The red lines you have highlighted are absolutely correct and normal, and appear on several ISR router platforms. Do not be concerned about them and about the delay in their appearance - they only comment on the process of reading the ROMMON and IOS image.

Best regards,

Peter

[Pawel Lenart]

Thank very much Peter. I just uploaded c2801-ipvoicek9-mz.124-5b.bin IOS which required 64 MB / 256MB to my C2801 and I will do more testing and see it it will crash. But this morning It coudn't load IOS (I have changed IOS to ADV IP SERVICES 15.1(4)-M1 since my first message). And when I booted manually It tried to extract IOS but failed and then it retried again. Console output attached. Is this related to memory / IOS ?

[Pawel Lenart]

After I changed my IOS, router was working fine but this morning again it started in rommon mode. When I issues boot command it started without any problems. Weird thing is that when I was starting my PC first and started console connection before I switched on router it started fine. But when I switch on router first it's going into rommon.

Any ideas why router is going into rommon mode instead of normal boot process?

[Peter Paluch]

Hi Pawel,

Aaah, that sounds reasonable.

When a PC boots, it initializes its COM ports as a part of the process. This initialization may very well cause a series of characters being spewn out from the COM port which are interpreted as a break sequence by your router during its bootup. In fact, there is no character in the COM communication known as a break sequence - instead, the break sequence is defined just as sending an invalid symbol - which is trivially performed by sending a sequence of characters using a different bit speed, thereby causing the other party to be unable to interpret the incoming symbol and declare a break. Now you see how easy it is for a PC to inadvertently break the boot sequence of your router (not even mentioning Windows trying to autodetect devices on serial ports by speaking to them).

Try booting your router and PC without having them connected via a console cable. Only after the PC is fully booted up and the HyperTerminal (or PuTTY/whatever) is started, connect your router to your PC.

Best regards,

Peter

[Pawel Lenart]

Hi Peter, It looks like you were right. Do you know how I can fix it? Can it be fixed?

[Peter Paluch]

Hello Pawel,

If you are talking about your router being interrupted while booting then there is nothing to be fixed here - the behavior is correct and expected. Simply turn on your router while disconnected from your PC, or turn it on only after the PC has finished booting. It is a deliberate feature on Cisco routers that the break sequence received during their boot will cause them to interrupt the booting process and enter the ROMMON mode. This is the basis of password recovery procedures.

Best regards,

Peter