Odd ASIC miner issue

I've got an older Rockminer T1 that's pointed to Slushpool. Prior to pointing it to Slushpool a few weeks ago, it was at Antpool. It was mining away with no issues for a few years. Shortly after switching to Slushpool, this issue started. This may or may not be relevant.

What's happening is that the miner will operate as expected for hours or days, then it will randomly drop offline for hours or days, then come back online on it's own. There is no discernible pattern. If I powercycle the controller, it will bring it back online for the time being, but the cycle repeats.

When this happens, I cannot ping the (Block Erupter) ethernet/ASIC controller from within the network. If the miner was experiencing a hardware failure, the controller should remain online and show errors on the ASIC hardware. If it were an issue with one of the 4 mining boards, or one of the two PSUs, I should see boards go down, not lose traffic from the controller. Bad controller, right? Nope - I bought a new controller and the issue persists.

It's located in a fully-redundant data center, so power, cooling, and network connectivity are not an issue. I have other equipment using those same resources (in the same rack) and they have no issues when this error occurs.

The miner is in a private network behind a firewall, so it's not likely the target of any type of DoS traffic; it only sees the internet through a NAT'd port. Reviewing traffic logs shows no spikes in traffic on the miner's port

I've replaced PSUs, power cables, network cables, changed physical network ports, and upgraded switch firmware. As mentioned above, other devices connected to the same switch do not observe any traffic issues. Congestion is not an issue either - plenty of bandwidth available.

Could the miner be receiving "bad" traffic that causes this? I wouldn't think so, but that's the only commonality I see here. I'm hesitant to switch to another pool just to test.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Submitted September 02, 2017 at 02:23AM by Tett0 http://bit.ly/2eqwalQ