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

Susan · April 1, 2017

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 · April 2, 2017

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

Susan · April 2, 2017

"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 · April 24, 2017

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.