Need help with my rpi that randomly stops working

It randomly stops working the red light is still on and the network port still have the lights like it haves traffic but SSH don’t work and also HDMI stops showing the image. Is there any way I can watch like logs or something to know what’s happening?. If I disconnect the power and connect again it turns on and it works again but after some time it stops working again. The first time this happened I didn’t realise it happened and it was suspended so it was not receiving files when I turned it on. When it was suspended it stopped having this problem but a couple of days ago the node recovered and started to receive more data and the problem started to happen again so I supposed is something related to Storj.

The red light happens usally cause its lacking power if your using the usb to power hard drives without external power, or the power brick your using is failing an cant produce 3amps.

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The following are known issues with any Raspberry Pi model other than RPi 4:

  • The USB ports and the Ethernet port share the same bus bandwidth. So, network activity decreases the bandwidth available for USB connected hard drives.
  • USB port power draw may cause instability. Any external hard drive should be powered with a separate power supply.
  • USB ports are not full speed ports.

Also, all Raspberry Pi models are susceptible to micro-SD card degradation.

If you are running a storj node on a RPi 1,2, or 3 … it’s likely the USB hard drive and the Ethernet adapter are competing for bus bandwidth resulting in some kind of over current, over heating situation and/or some problem with the power supply if you are running the hard drive via USB port power.

If you are running a RPi 4 … perhaps your micro-SD card is degrading and/or you need to use the USB 3 port as well as an external power supply. The USB 2 ports on the RPi 4 are on the same bus as the Ethernet port.

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Its a RPI4. The USB drive was on USB2 i changed to USB3 lets see if it solves the problem. I don’t know why this is happening know it have been running without problems like 1 year and half

I think the power is ok I bought the rpi with a kit that got a fan a case and a power supply for the RPI 4

Could be interesting to know if it is related to Storj indeed, but I’m not sure how it could kill a whole system… Even if it was eating up all the RAM, the out-of-memory killer would stop it brutally before the system crashes. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

What kind of disk do you use? 2.5"? 3.5"?
Is it a CMR or an SMR disk?

How is your system cpu and ram usages looking? How much iowait?

The problem described by OP is very common on the Raspberry Pi:

https://search.brave.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+ssh+stops+working

It’s not the storj software that breaks RPi operation. The RPi boards are quirky, unstable, and generally unreliable. Some people never have problems with them, but that doesn’t mean they are even close to the reliability of the least expensive “standard” PC/laptop/netbook.

I cant agree with this statement because rpi4s are running in enterprise environments 24/7 running in clusters doing all kinds of work, so you cannot say there not reliable… If they have firmware updates and the proper power they can run months without a hicup. Also rpi4 do have some ecc memory running inside of them they can be very stable if you configure them correctly.

RPi4s are probably MUCH more reliable than 1,2,3s …

However, even the RPI4 suffers from the SoC architecture jamming tons of traffic through the same quirky USB bus structure as well as micro-SD card corruption through wear and tear in “normal” operation.

There are ways to offload the OS to an external device which increase reliability.

And there are ways to ensure that any given RPi dependent project is fairly robust.

However, the off-the-shelf implementation is not reliable at all. If one is running a RPi in an enterprise environment, the RPi is probably well protected, well regulated, and well monitored…

For most purposes, a standard transistor will work fine at the surface of planet Earth, but fail quite quickly in outer space… unless properly shielded. And a RPi will be quite reliable if one is quite careful to ensure all its known quirky nature is addressed.

My RPi4s work quite well connected to the TV… but every few reboot cycles, the HDMI port will fail to function or the Ethernet cable will need to be disconnected and reconnected and so forth.

I love the RPi. I have at least 2 of every single version of the board.

Yes micro-sd cards are pretty useless that about the only thing I can agree to, The new firmware for rpi4s allow you to boot from any USB device directly without even having to use sdcards at all. The USB 3.0 is actually tied to a pcie on the pi4 so theres no real bandwidth limitation between ethernet and USB they dont share bandwidth.

Not to mention rpi4 also supports booting from network.

In case this isn’t clear, the red LED being on steady is a sign of good power. If it flickers/goes out then the Pi has insufficient power. If you have a monitor attached it will also give an indicator of this in the top right corner. I think in the past it was a rainbow block but I think more recently (RPi3? RPi4?) it changed to a small lightning bolt. If I remember correctly, a good way to check this is to run the following command:
dmesg -H | grep -i volt
Any results should indicate if your Pi went under the desired voltage. I can’t confirm absolutely as all of my Pis currently have sufficient power, but that was a command I found in the .bash_history of a Pi which at one time I was powering via a poor quality USB cable and having problems.

Maybe try to clear the logs file. This is the only think that i can think of, which is possible to change without doing anything… Also check the logs to see any disk errors or something simmilar. If you want to receive emails every time your node encounters errors, you can check my github repo (any feedback on that would be appreciated :wink: )

Also you can check the temperature with sensors command, and see if the problem has to do with temperature (i assume you don’t have any power issues, because people before me have mentioned this)

I have several rpi nodes.
I think this issue cause on the kernel not a storj node.

If you using attached usb hdd at rpi and updated the kernel recently,
Perhaps the below’s info will be helpful.
I’m running the same kernel version on all RPIs.

sudo rpi-update e1050e94821a70b2e4c72b318d6c6c968552e9a2