Random restarts of VM201

Hi,

I am seeing a “spontaneous” restarts of my two VM201 units.
It happens in random intervals and there is no message at the time when the unit restarts.
All info just disappears from the display and it comes back after a couple of seconds afterwards, with time reset to 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00
I do not suspect a power problem since there is other equipment using the same power supply and there is no problem with it.
When I disconnected ethernet cable from one of the units, it did not restart for several hours while the other one did restart. But as the intervals are random (span between 1 minute and several hours), this is not a hard proof.
Units are running build 1342.

Is this something that you have seen before? Any recommendations?

Update: I have just read in another post from Jonas called “VM201 remote control for dummies” that according to Velleman support there can be only one VM201 on a LAN. Well, we have some 10 VM201 units on the same LAN and I have heard that other users have also had problems. Could this be the reason? I will set one of my VM201s in a different network and check.

Cheers,
Vac

I have done more testing to find the root cause of the restarts but so far no joy.

Setup:
Two VM201 units with IP address in the same LAN.
Purpose of the VM201s is to break a GPS link as they are sitting between a GPS splitter and units receiving 1PPS signal.
Each VM201 is connected with an ethernet cable to a different port on an Extreme switch X460G2-48t-10G4.

After more testing I made following observations, however it does not lead to any conclusion.

  • when the VM201s are in different networks, they do not restart.
  • when both VM201s are in the same LAN, they will restart after some time, which is random.
  • when there is a network tap with Wireshark laptop connected to monitoring port connected between VM201 and network switch, VM201 does not restart even though there is another VM201 in the same LAN.

Wireshark traces are not showing any messages from or to the VM201s at the time of restarts.

I would really appreciate help from Velleman support with this issue or at least explanation of described behaviour.

Regards,
Vac

There is a firmware upgrade have you tried it?
You can find all of the files here.
http://www.vellemanusa.com/support/downloads/?code=VM201

Both units are already running latest VM201 firmware, build 1342.
I have also replaced one of them with another unit and it did not help.

After even more testing the conclusion is that this is likely to be a Layer 1 issue and quite likely a product fault since we are seeing restarts on some units while other are stable. It’s a pity we did not get to the bottom of this but we have spent enough resources on it already.
Sadly I received no support from Velleman, not even when going through their sales channel.
Our remaining option is not to use Velleman in our test environment and find another product for which we will get support.

V.