Goddess...
YOU ARE NOT.
Every corrupted FLASH is not a hardware failure. But since his was an
RMA I bet his was. We wouldn't RMA on a simple corruption because those are
readlly fixed with a reformat and reconfigure.
3.3.2 and up have had more than normal corruptions. AGAIN, we changed the
layout in FLASH and it seems to have problems with some of the older layouts
when it converts the format. 3.3.2c1 is better than 3.3.2, that was one
of the problems in 3.3.2. We haven't found any sign of a bug or any trend,
the only thing we think may play a role is the number of times the unit has
been upgraded - ie, what was the FLASH formatted under originally. 3.1.4?
3.3.1? 3.0.4? But even that is speculation.
There is a fundamental change in the formatting of the FLASH so part of the
upgrade is rearranging all of the data. If there is any oddities, hidden
corruption, etc, in the existing format this is likely to trip over it as
it will translate to the new format in unpredictable ways. Like people who
started getting weird local IPs for users - they must have had some random
bits misplaced that were in areas not used for 3.3.1 or prior, and when they
loaded 3.3.2 or up suddently those bits were sitting in the middle of a user
data structure. The optimum solution is to upgrade, erase flash, and
reconfigure the unit. You can't do this via a normal upgrade. And since
it works fine for most users, it would be pointless to tell everyone to do
that. If someone has problems with it, then they need to do it. If it
hits all the machines at the site, I suspect the configuration and/or
environment first - the odds of that happening are so ridiculously low that
there must be a common fault native to that site. We do scores of upgrades
every day, and people are constantly downloading the ComOS. And it is a
very, very small number of users who report any problem. And this RMA is the
first one I've heard of, it is just coincidence that it happened with the
upgrade. The FLASH chip probably went bad long before and it just happened
that the older release wasn't trying to use that bit of FLASH, 3.3.2 tried
to access it and boom, HW failure reported. 3.3.2 has more to store, so it
is using more FLASH areas actively.
I've never personally had a problem upgrading any machine, and the machines
here are running it with no problems.
-MZ
-- Livingston Enterprises - Chair, Department of Interstitial Affairs Phone: 800-458-9966 510-426-0770 FAX: 510-426-8951 megazone@livingston.com For support requests: support@livingston.com <http://www.livingston.com/> Snail mail: 6920 Koll Center Parkway #220, Pleasanton, CA 94566 See me in person: Internet Expo, Boston, MA, October 16-17, Booth 422 ;-)