Unwanted Shutdown of Dietpi Device Topic is solved

[wollybolly]

Hello together,

I am a very happy user of a Allo Sparky SBC with Dietpi running Plex Media Server (and ProFTP for data transfer) and in general everything works flawless for about 1 year or longer, even 1080p streaming. Besides plex and proftp I have not installed any other software. The device is connected over LAN to my router.

But 5 months ago we moved from Germany to Malaysia (for working purpose) and since then sometimes I find my device shut down when coming home. When moving I took everything with us: charger, power supply, cables, no change here.

As here it is very hot here (around 30degree celcius) all the time and the sparky comes without active cooling the first step I bought my self some fans for the sparky and my external drives, which managed to reduce cpu temperature from 55degree @idle to 40degree @idle and 67degree @full load to 52degree @full load. The hard disk came from hot surface to cool surface, without having any measuring data.
At first it seemed to do the trick but unfortunately only for a while.
At next step I bought a UPS because I thought maybe the electricity supply here is not stable enough. But now even with having the sparky and the hard disks connected to the UPS still already some shut downs occured, e.g. two within in the last two days.

Sometimes it runs for a week with streaming everything from SD to 1080p, sometimes only half a day without watching anything.

When the device is shutdown I unplug the sparky power supply (iPad1 2A charger) and after plugging back in, dietpi boots and everything is fine, until I find the device shut down another time.

How can I get to know when and why my dietpi device shuts down? Is there any way seeing those events logged somewhere?
I hope somebody can help me.

Thanks,
Christian

[DarrenHill]

How old is the charger?

Over time such hardware can tend to degrade, producing lower current and voltage which could perhaps cause such an issue if the device happens to do something requiring more juice (especially if anything's hooked up to the USB ports etc).

First thing I'd do is either test what the charger is currently actually giving out (not just what it says on the label) or just swap it out for a newer one.

[wollybolly]

Thanks for the fast reply.

The iPad1 2A charger came with the original iPad (2010 or 2011 wasn't it?), so it is around 8 to 9 years old.
I also thought about that the charge may be a reason but only in terms of the heat so my charger is covered by the new fan.

For the USB plugs I have to add that my two external hard drives have separate power supplies, so the maximum current should be lower than the 2A. Nevertheless I will change the charger to a 1year old 2.4A Anker Charger and monitor the stability.

Is there any chance checking logs for possible software shutdown reasons?

Thanks,
Christian

[DarrenHill]

Concerning logs I've no idea, someone else will have to answer that.

It's just from experience of issues and shutdowns over the years with various Raspberry Pi's which almost always ended up as either being dying power supplies or occasionally dying uSD cards.

[Joulinar]

Hi,
if there really is an issue with the power supply, you wont find it in the logs. Because your SBC is going down simply. No chance to write something into the logs before power down.

Try to install "rsyslog". This will collect quite some system messages and store it in /var/log/*.log files.

Code: Select all

apt-get install rsyslog

Code: Select all

root@DietPiVM1:~# ls -l /var/log/ |grep .log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root  root     0 Jan  9 12:35 alternatives.log
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm    247 Jan  9 23:21 auth.log
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm  10168 Jan  9 23:20 daemon.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root  root     0 Jan  9 23:17 dpkg.log
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm  44514 Jan  9 23:19 kern.log
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root  utmp   292 Jan  9 23:21 lastlog
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm  56538 Jan  9 23:20 syslog
-rw-r----- 1 root  adm    268 Jan  9 23:20 user.log
root@DietPiVM1:~#

however these files are overwritten during boot, best to my knowledge. So you would need to check if you could read them if you unplug your SD card and connect it to some desktop computer.

[wollybolly]

Hi guys,

thanks for your feedback. After replacing the old power supply with a newer one my device had no issue for the past two weeks so I think the old power supply was the issue. Would have never thought about it

If there is coming up any new issue I will have a look into rsyslog data.

I'll mark this thread closed, thanks.

BR

[Joulinar]

Hi,

to increase the log level, you as well can alter the DietPi Log Mode. For this you can use dietpi-software and change the Log System to FULL. This will install rsyslog automatically