Very strange Nokia IPSO issue

[Youngy]

Hello all,

Allthough this issue is not strictly a CP one I am going to ask anyway as some of you may have come across this one before.

Ok here goes. Last week whilst working from the CLI on one of our Nokia boxes the terminal session just hung. I then relaunched and could not reconnect - would just get a black screen and cursor.

I then tried a reboot by turning the box off and back on again. Waited for the link lights to all come up etc. Again nothing but a blank screen in the terminal software (connected directly to Nokia by null modem cable).

Then tried a reset of the Nokia - on the 380 there is a little reset button next to the PCMCIA cards. The box appears to come up but still no terminal connection.

At this point I decided to swap out the entire Box for a spare Nokia we have on site for any failures at the hardware level that any of our Nokias may have.

I test this box with my laptop and set it up ready to accept the last backup of the Nokia that appears to have failed. It is all good. The only difference between the replacement box and the 'failed' one is that the 'failed' box has a GIG card in it on Slot 1.

I swap over the Gig card and boot the new box successfully. I then rack this box in place for the 'failed' one. Now it also is unreachable and nothing come up on the terminal.

I try tera term, tiger term and hyper terminal. Not one can connect. I try a new null modem cable. Still nothing.

I takle the Gig card out and boot again - still nothing.

The 'failed' box now boots just fine on my test bench.........!@#$#$

Has anyone ever seen anything like this??!!

[ddarby1]

I had an interesting case which is possibly related:

I had an IP330 but forgot my regular cable and so bought a stock Null Modem Cable from a Computer Shop. It worked fine on mine.

However, my colleague bought a near identical IP330 which seemd OK, but all we ever got was the blinking cursor and AT command with a blank screen, using the same cable, CRT, Hyper Terminal, etc.

Thinking it strange we swapped out all the Hardware parts, even between the boxes, which lead to mine having exactly the same problem.

I naturally thought I'd damaged mine in some way. However, when I found the original cable again (which was supplied with a previously purchased linux based firewall) everything worked fine.

So, definitely the cable I guess , but I couldn't understand why mine worked in the first place and not afterwards.

Question for anyone - are there any differences between a Nokia Serial cable and an ordinary Null Modem Cable (I thought there weren't).

If this isn't related to your problem, it might be interesting to note that changing the cable fixed the problem from the thread 'IP330's fail to boot' 2005-10-10 by bodillc, which you also commented on at the time.

[Youngy]

Yeah I thought it might have been the cable as well.

So I used a test Nokia on my desk with a bunch of cables, both the ones that came with the Nokia and other Null Modem cables.

I then used two of the cables that were working on my test machine with the other Nokia - both cables just have a flashing cursor.

It just pisses me off!

:)

[Youngy]

Well everyone,

After playing with this some more it looks liek the issue is with the comm port on a single machine - the management machine.

My laptop works, another test laptop works. Management server does not. Despite the comm port looking all great from within windows device manager.

So now I use SSH to get to the device until I can figure out how to fix the comm port........weirdness