Earlier this week my IDRANet network became really unresponsive and Cortex indicated I had a couple of nodes fail. The effect on the remaining network was awful with buttons not working or long delays and their indicators not matching the current states. I quickly checked the wiring on these two nodes which seemed fine and restarted Cortex a couple of times to no avail. So I swapped to 'fault the node and stop communicating' and it settled down. I was however surprised how disruptive this was to the remaining unrelated network nodes.. a lesson learnt, I shall disable continual retrys as I couldn't afford this to happen if I wasn't at home.
Anyway onto finding the problem. I was surprised the structure view didn't identify failed nodes somehow (e.g. red crossed) and I couldn't see an obvious way to find this info...but once I had the 'stop communicating/advise user' option then the plan view flashed failed sub nodes. The two failing nodes are both connected to one six way junction box and so I decided to check other nodes on that from within Cortex. The two errant nodes showed 'node faulted' IIRC in their properties but other attached hardware (ITR02's) did not show this and instead showed node status '0' which I think means 'OK' . These were also not flashing in the plan view so I assumed they were OK. I altered the polling period down to 5 secs just to be sure - still no fault dialog, no fault showing in properties and no flashing in plan view. Stupidly I also assumed that the red rapidly flashing light on an attached RS232 interface was indicative of communication.
So I then assumed I had either a coincident double fault or maybe a track fault on the junction box. Red herring. In fact I had lost IDRANet comms to the whole junction box because of a broken wire and so all 5 attached devices had failed but Cortex only advised me of two and only these two flashed in the plan view. It's likely that on a network restart it would have advised me of all five but I didn't take that path. Not sure if this is as expected ? It just seems a little misleading but it was fairly quickly resolved as two coincidental failures is always an unlikely scenario.
K
Anyway onto finding the problem. I was surprised the structure view didn't identify failed nodes somehow (e.g. red crossed) and I couldn't see an obvious way to find this info...but once I had the 'stop communicating/advise user' option then the plan view flashed failed sub nodes. The two failing nodes are both connected to one six way junction box and so I decided to check other nodes on that from within Cortex. The two errant nodes showed 'node faulted' IIRC in their properties but other attached hardware (ITR02's) did not show this and instead showed node status '0' which I think means 'OK' . These were also not flashing in the plan view so I assumed they were OK. I altered the polling period down to 5 secs just to be sure - still no fault dialog, no fault showing in properties and no flashing in plan view. Stupidly I also assumed that the red rapidly flashing light on an attached RS232 interface was indicative of communication.
So I then assumed I had either a coincident double fault or maybe a track fault on the junction box. Red herring. In fact I had lost IDRANet comms to the whole junction box because of a broken wire and so all 5 attached devices had failed but Cortex only advised me of two and only these two flashed in the plan view. It's likely that on a network restart it would have advised me of all five but I didn't take that path. Not sure if this is as expected ? It just seems a little misleading but it was fairly quickly resolved as two coincidental failures is always an unlikely scenario.
K
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