I have 2 PBXact 100 systems set up in a High Availability/HA configuration running our phone system. Yesterday, the primary stopped responding out of the blue; my ssh session was responding and the console seemed fine, but none of our phones would do anything & the web GUI would not load. I tried failing over to the secondary, but asterisk would not stop on the primary and secondary wouldn’t take over because of this. Issuing the reboot command resulted in it hanging, my guess is that it was waiting for asterisk to stop. This eventually required me to turn off the primary for the secondary to take over. Our phones are up and running now, though with no redundancy.
The primary system is now on the bench in my office. When it’s turned on, the fans and lights come on for 3-4 seconds, then everything shuts off and the cycle repeats itself. The only connection out of the PSU is 12 volt power with the standard motherboard auxiliary 12v power plug, so to test that it wasn’t the power supply not supplying enough power, I connected a standard ATX PSU to it (shorting out the pins on the ATX MB connector to trick it into turning on without actually being connected to a PC) and the same exact behavior presented itself. I removed the RAM, blew out the socket with compressed air, wiped the pins, reseated the memory, and nothing changed.
When I began writing this, the suggested topics box brought up an old post of mine from 2 years ago in which the same system exhibited the same behavior, though that time after a repeated & extended power outages. This time, however, there was no power outage. In fact we have since had a generator installed so that this will not happen again, and the system just quit randomly during the middle of the day. According to my notes from 2021, the system just one day decided that it was going to turn on; I ran several hardware tests that all passed, so assumed it was a fluke due to the power failures and moved on.
At this point, the motherboard seems to be the most likely culprit. When I pulled the RAM (which was glued in place 
), I found that the motherboard is an ITX-M9F version 1.3 with an integrated Intel Atom processor. Looking online, I’ve found 1.1 and 1.5 of this motherboard, but all from sources overseas on websites that seem sketchy at best. I’ve located a few full PBXact systems for sale from people in the US & Canada, but they all have ‘UC’ printed on the sticker on the front of the case whereas ours does not.
Questions:
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Does the hardware revision of the motherboard make a difference? In my experience with other systems it has not, but this is the only HA system I’ve worked with.
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Will replacing the motherboard cause any issues with licensing or anything like that? (As I found out painfully in the past for an unrelated issue, Sangoma seems to have disabled the registration servers for this old version; while I can reinstall the system from the flash drive built from the image, it refuses to activate.
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What motherboards are used in the PBXact UC100 and UC60 model appliances? I ask about the UC60 because the port configuration appears to be identical to ours & wondering if it’s the same board… there seem to be many more of these systems available than the 100.
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Is it possible to clone the drive from our PBXact system, shove it into a PC, resolve any OS driver issues, and have it function in the HA environment? While the small rack-mounted form factor is certainly nice, it’s also a royal pain finding hardware for it. Also, same question as in #2 - any licensing issues to be concerned about when shifting the system to different hardware?
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I have thus far been unable to find any detailed information about the hardware in these systems or any way to order components from Sangoma. Does anyone know if there’s a page for parts buried somewhere that I have yet to discover?
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Does anyone happen to have an old PBXact 100 system or even just the motherboard that they’d like to sell? I’d much rather buy it from someone here rather than a random person online…
