[SOLVED] Orange Pi PC dead (?) ethernet after a few months of continuous operation

[Susan]

I installed Armbian xenial 3.4.112 on an Orange Pi PC in July of 2016. It ran non-stop until sometime in February. I realized it was no longer sending data to the internet.

 

When I checked, the Orange Pi PC was still powered. However, the green+yellow ethernet LEDs were both blinking together at what looked like 2sec intervals.

 

After only a short time of running, the CPU was already 84C. When I originally had put the Orange Pi PC into service, it would remain close to 43C.

 

I connected a monitor and keyboard. It booted and a look at syslog showed the eth0 was looping on `DHCPDISCOVER`.

 

I tried `ifconfig etho down` and `ifconfig eth0 up` and not change.

 

I tried a new SD card with the latest download image Armbian Xenial 3.4.113. No change in behavior. The Orange Pi PC was running but the eth0 would not.

 

I replaced the Orange Pi PC with a new one and tested both the new SD image and the old SD image worked fine.

 

I put the new Orange Pi PC back into service. It lasted two months before the same result with the ethernet

 

Any ideas what I may be doing that is killing the boards? What should I monitor with the latest board? I still have the two failed boards. Is there anything I should look at on them?

[borombo]

Ethernet doesn't like static electricity. This may be caused by thunder and lightning outside.

 

 

[Susan]

"Static electricity" from electrical storms would coincide close enough to account for the most recent failure. It would not surprise me to be the cause of both. 

 

Thank you.

 

I will pick up a low cost USB-RJ45 dongle and keep using the old units.

[Susan]

Follow up:

 

I have now managed to kill the ethernet on three Orange Pi PCs. It is likely they all died of the same cause: static electricity into the board via a USB RTL device connected to an outdoor antenna. Each unit is still operational, other than the onboard ethernet, and a USB ethernet adapter works.

 

Similarly systems using the Raspberry Pi B and B+ have not suffered the problem.