Viewing running config in putty session causing laptop to reboot on high perf laptop?

ande0255

I'm re-setting up the lab tonight, and I am having the same problem I had on a much older / low performance laptop that I am now, which is when I hit show run and the space bar a few times to kick out the running config my pc restarts itself.

I am connecting to the routers via 2509 Access Router with an octal cable, baud rate at 9600 on COM3 USB 3.0 port, and the machine has a 500GB Western Digital SSD and 16GB RAM with all sorts of hyper-threading and things I needed for studying VMware and just upgraded to Windows 10 (COM ports actually wouldn't open for putty on Windows 8.1).

I will have one putty session open at a time, maybe a web page or two multi tasking watching videos and writing a config either in notepad or on the CLI, and at some point with just a single putty session open I'll type show run and space bar a couple times and immediate reboot. This thing can run the highest end PC games like Titanfall or Hatred on medium to high settings and never once had my pc turn off or reboot, with all sorts of other applications running in the background.

I've watched system resources and can't catch any culprit, has anyone else experienced and overcome this historical home lab injustice?

ande0255

Ahh caught the event ID under system in event viewer, microsoft event id 10010, something related to the response time of the DCOM server.

I am having trouble finding any solution to increasing the response time though, only steps to verify my user has full rights

wd40

Are you using an old USB to serial converter?

My Boss had a similar problem, when using putty the laptop will crash and reboot, after replacing the old converter the problem was resolved.

ande0255

Did they replace the converter cable entirely, or just update / change drivers for the converter?

Mow

I had this happen to me a few years ago, it was the serial to usb driver.

wd40

Old one was really old (Windows XP Drivers only old) so we bought a new one like this.

® USB - Serial Adapter, USB 2.0-DA-70156 | DIGITUS

ande0255

That is fantastic, thanks for the ideas, I'm going to try a driver update then if that fails buying a higher end converter to see if that does the trick.

Thanks for your responses, greatly appreciated!

ande0255

Updating the Prolific firmware to the latest version caused the laptop to reboot less, but all the same is still rebooting randomly when issuing commands, so I threw $40 on this USB to Serial adapter:

USB to Serial Adapter cable, Windows 10 | U.S. Converters™

I'll report back if it works, it appears to have a lot of claim of mechanisms in its firmware and chipset to manage data rates so it doesn't peg the PC when via the serial connection, and actually creates a virtual COM port which I thought was interesting.

I really hope this works, this putty issue is just killing my ability to break away on a hardcore lab session, though I'm limping through with saving everything before issuing a command over the serial connection.

Coolhandluke

Hi,
This might sound quite strange as I had the same problem. Used a prolific USB dongle and no matter which driver I used (and I tried a LOT) my machine, and some work laptops blue screened when receiving lots of data. After lots of testing, I switched to teraterm for all serial connection and i have never had a crash since. So ... Like I said, its strange ... But try a different client.

Good luck

ande0255

Thanks for the input, if push comes to shove my work laptop has a serial connector on it in case I need to be deployed into the field on an emergency thing, but I hate looking at that machine outside of work hours. But if this new cable I ordered doesn't work, I'll have to go that route, and if that fails a new client it will be - Thanks for your input!