MX67C intermittent connectivity (possible rebooting) with MX 17.6 firmware

[harmankardon]

Most of our sites using MX67C with MX 17.6 firmware have been running without any issue, in fact MX 17.6 resolved a number of issues (mostly related to cellular).

But some sites seem to experience minor interruptions to their connectivity a few times a week. I get notified of this by a series of email alerts that usually come in the following order:

1. "VPN connectivity changed" email stating site-to-site VPN to that site went down.
2. "Uplink status changed" email stating site has switched to cellular as its uplink.
3. "VPN connectivity changed" email stating site-to-site VPN to that site came back up.
4. "Uplink status changed" email stating site has switched back to Internet 1 (wired WAN) as its uplink.
5. "VPN connectivity changed" email stating site-to-site VPN to that site went down.
6. "VPN connectivity changed" email stating site-to-site VPN to that site came back up.
7. "Cellular came up" email stating the site has connected to a cellular network.

From the first email to the last email is usually 2 minutes or so.

The other day, I happened to notice I get a similar sequence of emails in the same time period if I manually reboot or power cycle a MX67C running MX 17.6. In the past I have noticed that an MX67C running MX 17.6 connects to the dashboard via cellular first for about 30 seconds or so before switching to wired WAN when booting up, which I believe triggers the emails regarding cellular failover.

Unfortunately (and one of my pet peeves with Meraki) is that there is no "device boot" event in the event log. The Connectivity bar on the Summary page does show around 2 minutes of no connectivity but no way for me to know if there was a true WAN outage or if the device rebooted. 

I will dig into this deeper with Meraki support in the hopes they can identify reboot events, but wondered if anyone else was seeing anything similar?

[harmankardon]

Shameless bump.

After upgrading to MX 17.7 and the MX 17.8 (patches notes for both mentioned fixes for device reboots), I am still experiencing random reboots with several of our MX67C devices. I have a ticket open with support now and they have confirmed these random reboots are a known issue and engineering is working on it, but no other details.

I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place because 17.x allowed us to get cellular failover working on many of our MX67C but these device reboots are very disruptive as the brief loss in internet connectivity causes some of the systems at this location to crash (a whole other unrelated can of worms).

Anyone else experiencing anything like this and have a workaround? I've asked Meraki if the reboots are related to a specific setting or configuration (since it seems to happen at some locations and not others) but all I get is "it's a known issue" and nothing further.

[harmankardon · Accepted solution]

If anyone comes across this thread and is experiencing a similar issue, upgrading to MX 17.10 resolved things for me. When this firmware was released, I actually received an email from Meraki support letting me know that MX 17.10 should correct my issues and they were right.