[j-nsp] Failures in HD-only M7i routers

[Raniery Pontes]

Hi everybody,

  we´ve been running different M-series boxes including ~20 M7i´s. In 
the last 12 months, we had an issue with 3 of these M7i´s: they crashed 
and couldn´t recover "by themselves". These failures happened usually in 
association to power failures in facilities, and logs also indicate 
problems when writing to the hard-disk.

These boxes only have a hard-drive as storage media, so there isn´t a 
flash memory in the routers.

After the crash, usually we´ve seen these routers continuously trying to 
boot from HD, but without success. Then, we had to disconect power, take 
a breath (it´s serious, about 5 minutes long) and power up the router 
again. After that, theses routers were able to recover, loading Junos 
correctly.

Disregarding what may have have caused these crashes, I´m worried about 
the recovering capacities of these boxes, after a crash.

So, I´ve got a simple questions: how dangerous is to run these boxes, 
without a flash card ?

I´d like to know if everybody thinks this is a really bad idea, or it 
shouldn´t be really an issue and I simply had bad luck.


Thanks

-- 
Raniery Pontes
::::::::::::::::::::::
raniery at rnp.br
http://www.rnp.br/ceo/