169.254.8.110 ... not helpful
KiwiSDR owned by others in our club. I offered to help rescue it.
It had been in service until 2023 or so when it disappeared off our club station's network. Restarting did nothing. It didn't answer to a ping let alone an admin http request on 8073.
So now it's here with me. It's on the wire ethernet. But it is insisting that it's IP should be 169.254.8.110 ... This is not good, of course. I can power-cycle it as many times as I want but it always comes back to that IP (brought the PS with me, too, the one that had run it for 2 years without issue).
When I look at the wire, I can see the Kiwi ARPing what would be the gateway on the club's net, so presumably the default gateway is set on it. I can see it ARPing for certain DNS servers as well so those must be hardwired or were, at one time, given out by DHCP (same could be true of the default gateway, of course).
But it's not sending DHCP Discover/Offer/Request/Acks so why would it have a 169.254/16 address? Shouldn't it only self-assign that if DHCP doesn't answer? It's not looking for DHCP so it can't really time out.
I did gin up a virtual IP (on 169.254/16) on my MacBook's WiFi and even SSHing to the Kiwi with that gets nowhere (I can see the requests going out but nothing comes back).
I am not actually a KiwiSDR person so this is all new to me. It's in a silver box and was, I think, bought around 2021. I don't even know if it's a "1" or a "2" let alone what software is on it.
How do I convince the device that "no, really, go ahead and try DHCP again - it's all good"?
Is there a secret reset button - I have paperclips I can straighten.
Is there a serial console available via either of the USB ports?
Next thing for me to try is to connect the ethernet directly to my (other) PC and see if we can work around things that way.
Peter
Comments
Someone's probably mucked with it. Just re-flash it. You want to update from Debian 8 to Debian 11 for security reasons anyway: http://kiwisdr.com/info/#id-net-reflash
Thank you for the link. I have no idea which BeagleBone is in this. I gather I need to open up the box since there is no external uSD slot.
I see many references at that link to ssh'ing into the device but, again, it's not pulling an address. I have watched the wire long enough now to know that it is, in fact, sending DHCPDISCOVER packets but. I have also set up a virtual IP on my Mac with a 169.254.0.0/16 address and plugged the device directly into a PC. It never answers anything on it's self-assigned IP, not SSH, not HTTP/S, not even ICMP.
If I create a uSD with the software on it, will the device know it boot from that before its internal "disk" (flash, whatever) or will I have to do "something" to tell the device's firmware to boot from the uSD?
So took it apart, see the uSD slot on what I gather is a "Beagle Bone Green" from the "BBGxxx" serial number on a sticker. Did I write down the Kiwi S/N before partially reassembling? No I did not. 5000-something. No idea what that means in terms of age/model.
Oh, and the fan was disconnected. No good can come from that, so I plugged it into the socket that the fan's wires seemed to "want" to connect to ... Not the issue, of course, but surely not helping.
Just realized that the device is sending DHCPDISCOVER frames but the DHCP server never sends a DHCPOFFER ... this is an in-service ISP router and all other devices on the same network get addresses just fine. I looked at the router's config and without changing anything (I could) it supports 99 addresses so it's not like it's running out (I think the server would send a DHCPNAK if that were the case).
Beginning to think that the Kiwi is not able to receive Ethernet data ... Not good if true.
But the DHCP server isn't sending an offer, either ... hmm.
A re-flash without attempting to save the prior configuration is much simpler (since you can't connect anyway in order to save the config). So no ssh or other connection method is needed.
You just follow the instructions on that web page for downloading the xxx.img.xz file onto a Windows, Mac or Linux-on-a-PC machine. Unzip it and use a utility to write the xxx.img file to an sd card. Then with the Kiwi powered down insert the sd card and power up. If you don't get the LED pattern described then you may have to repeat the insert/power-up, but with the user/boot button held down as described in the instructions.
There is a possibility that the Ethernet chip on the Beagle has gone bad or some other Beagle failure. Especially if you don't see the yellow/green LEDs on the Ethernet RJ45. But this is not a big deal since a replacement Beagle is only $45 or so. And you just follow the exact same procedure to re-flash it in order to prepare a new Beagle for use.
Thank you. I saw the button in question. I saw the bit about trying to avoid 32-GB uSD cards ... I hope I have something big enough but not too big. Probably will need to borrow one from a D-STAR rig or a scanner ... but I think they are all 32 ...
Green and yellow LEDs on the NIC look like they know what they're doing.
I've been using 32GB cards here recently without problems. This was suspected to be an issue with older versions of U-Boot used with Debian 8. So probably no longer an issue now that everything is Debian 11 based. I just now removed that comment from the instructions. Thanks for mentioning it.