PBXact 100 Appliance Troubleshooting

We’ve had 2 PBXact100 appliances running in HA mode since the latter half of 2019. A few weeks ago, a power failure corrupted the drbd file system on the primary’s drive - said it was the wrong media type. I bought an identical drive, installed PBXact, resolved strange troubles that wasn’t necessary when I first installed the system, joined the cluster, and watched it sync. Thought I was done.

Unfortunately, the cluster health report indicated problems. Before I was able to resolve them, we lost power again & the phones did not recover. I ended up taking the freshly-installed system down & let the secondary take over VOIP services. The reinstalled system was then brought back up to act as the backup system. Upon looking at the file systems on the drive, I discovered that there were no files on 3 of the 4 file systems that I’d watched it synchronize! No file system errors - just no files. I was working remote when discovering this on Friday afternoon, so couldn’t really reinstall it again at the time - just turned it off via the halt command in case we lost power again and left it for today.

After being off for about 70 hours, the system now won’t turn on. I plug in a different cord with confirmed good power - tested it at the cord, the contacts coming off the female power socket, and at the contacts entering the power supply all at 119 volts AC. The light on the PSU comes on & stays on, outputting between 12.25 and 12.30 volts DC on each of the yellow wires exiting the PSU. The fans come on for about 3 or 4 seconds when turning on the power switch and then go off. The bottom green light on the back of the board facing the drive caddy nearest the SATA cable comes on for about as long as the fans. The old-school molex connector has proper power - 5 volt DC on the red wire, 12 volt on the yellow - when the fans initially come on, but it goes away when it turns off. Even after the fans/light go off, there is still 12 volt DC power leaving the PSU.

There does not appear to be any physical damage to the appliance. It only left the network rack 15 minutes ago when I brought it to the bench in my office for testing. It’s never been run without a UPS on it, though this has been drained twice in the recent past as stated above - UPS would’ve protected it from any kind of surge when power was restored. I’ve tried disconnecting the drive, pulling the CMOS battery for long enough to clear the BIOS, and swearing at it - nothing has worked. (Great fun working on this thing… the retaining clips which lock the cables in place apparently weren’t considered sufficient and everything is hot melt glued together, even the battery into the socket! :confused: :laughing: ) It came with no documentation as far as troubleshooting or documentation on the motherboard/hardware. I find it hard to believe that this appliance is so fragile that simply sitting for a few days while off could have caused some kind of damage to the board in this thing, but that’s what it’s acting like. :frowning_face:

Right now, the only reason our phones are working is because the secondary has been & currently is operating in standalone mode. I really need to get this fixed, but don’t know what to try next… doesn’t have a standard PCI slot on it, so my diagnostic card won’t work & there’s never anything output to the monitor port unless it’s so quick as not be drawn on the screen. Does anyone have any ideas of where I could find detailed information about this device or something else I could try?

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