Customer Service Center

Why does the CPU-5004A  take so long to boot up ?

The Spirent TestCenter CPU-5004A and Ng-100G-F2 are a card pair that are conjoined cards and
so are required installed together. First the NG-100G-F2 card  followed by the CPU-5004A, once the
NG-100G-F2 goes ready (green status led).

• Architecture:
  The CPU-5004A is a full multi core imbedded computer and runs a version of Linux, with that comes some
  house keeping issues that have to be maintained for proper health and control. One of these operations is a 
  file system check (FSCK) which takes the longest period of time to complete.

• So what is it doing while I am waiting for it to complete the boot up operation.
  When you first power it up or move to another chassis the CPU-5004A will run
  FSCK across 3 partitions. This with other items such as loading the multiple FPGA
  images to the NG-100G-F2 card and the firmware onto the CPU-5004A card can take up to
  1 hour to complete . It is very important not to power cycle or remove the card during the boot
  process. If the FSCK process is interupted it could cause the FSCK to restart and
  could even cause the hard drive to become corrupted. (note 1)
  When the card is ready the status LED will change to green.
   
• Is there a solution for the card to boot up faster?
  Steps were taken in the 3.90 and later to decrease the time frame for boot up.  

         note 1. If you have waited for 2 hours and the cards are still not ready please contact
                       Spirent Support at "support@spirent.com"