[c-nsp] Rebooting PIX

[Mark Taylor]

Hi,

I've got a Cisco PIX 515 (64Mb RAM) that has started to reboot randomly 
after being up for between 30 mins and 20 hours. It's been fine for a couple 
of years and just started to do this in the last week.

Yesterday I upgraded to software version 6.3(4) in case it was a software 
problem, however it has rebooted again since. The device has been powered 
down/up but that didn't make any difference (although after the power cycle 
it survived the longest interval yet before rebooting).

I'm logging to a syslog server (at warning level), but the logs don't show 
anything to indicate why it would be rebooting and I've made sure that there 
isn't logging to the console. There aren't any interface errors on the PIX 
or on the switch. The config hasn't changed recently and it's not down to 
heat or fan failure as I've checked that. I've also made sure the power 
cables are seated correctly (the site hasn't lost power either).

As far as I can work out, the particular device could potentially suffer 
from any of the following field notices, however I'm not convinced that 
these are the problem because it's uptime was nearly 2 years before this 
problem started about a week ago:
PIX-515 Defective AC Power Supply
PIX 515 and 506 Hang
PIX 515 NMI Exception Crash

I'm just about to leave a PC terminal connected to the console port and log 
it to see if it outputs any console messages before it reboots however I'm 
now beginning to think that this could be a hardware issue.

Has anybody got any other suggestions or ways in which I might be able to 
find the reason that it's rebooting.

Thanks in advance,
Mark.