Ubiquiti PoE 5 router dead

[Handruin]

This morning I woke up to no Internet so after troubleshooting for a bit I found that my Ubiquiti PoE 5 router was no longer responsive. The lights are on but there is no one home. I was not able to get into the management web page to investigate and nothing was routing from inside my home LAN. I looked up my order date and I purchased it May of 2015 so it has had a shorter service life than I expected and would have liked for a device I expected to be a little better than a consumer unit.

I need to do some more investigation into the issue because I've read that some people have had issues with the internal usb thumb drive failing in the PoE and Lite models causing similar issues. To troubleshoot this and determine if it is actually the internal drive, I need to get the console cable to be able to see the message to verify that this is the reason. There are instructions on how to use the EdgeMax rescue kit in this post here for restoring the unit. If I don't do this, I could just order a new drive and flash it to chance that it was the drive only putting my out less than $10.

 

[Stereodude]

That sucks. I've had better luck than that with my cheap consumer routers. None of the router's I've used over the years have actually failed even after many years of use. I've always upgraded them to get new features (faster wireless protocols).

 

[timwhit]

I'm still using a Ubiquiti Routerboard Pro from 2011.

 

[Clocker]

I feel your pain. I just had a switch fail - Netgear GS105 - after only a few years of use. Didn't figure it out until after doing an OS reinstall to try to figure it the terrible network performance I was getting. It was a cheap item but never expected it to fail.

In retrospect, it was a pos from the beginning. Could never figure it why my server would not negotiate the correct network speed after my server would awake from sleep. I had to manually set the network speed to 1gb instead of auto negotiate. Once it got to the point where my network transfer speed was about 5MB/sec (recently), replacing the switch with a cheap $15 switch solved the negotiation problem and brought my transfer speeds back up to 115 MB/s.

 

[Stereodude]

I feel your pain. I just had a switch fail - Netgear GS105 - after only a few years of use. Didn't figure it out until after doing an OS reinstall to try to figure it the terrible network performance I was getting. It was a cheap item but never expected it to fail.

They have cheap capacitors in them that go bad. If you swap them out for new the switch will work fine again. I did that with mine.

 

[Handruin]

I got my new usb thumb drive from Amazon today. Turns out after a little more reading in the Ubiquiti forum thread that the 8GB SanDisk Cruzer USB stick does not actually work with this router (wtf)...at least not the most recent version of this USB stick that I got, so no luck yet in recovery.

I did find several people confirm that this Kingston Digital DataTraveler SE9 16GB USB 2.0 DTSE9H/16GBZ works fine, so I bought two just in case. I also purchased this EDIMS 6 FT FTDI Chip USB RJ45 Console Cable for Cisco Routers that is reported to work with the EdgeRouter PoE5 so that I can connect to the console port and actually see wtf is going on to help in troubleshooting. Parts won't arrive until the weekend so I'll have to wait until then to get a handle on this annoyance of an issue.