SRX240 and SRX340 failure rates
Recently I upgraded dozens of SRX240H2 and SRX340 series Juniper firewalls and around %10 of SRX240H2 boxes either crashed during upgrade or after upgrade and none on 340 series. Although 340 is a newer platform, I would like to be positive and believe the fact that Juniper has improved both hardware and software quality. What do you think? What is your experience on newer platforms as far as hardware and software are concerned?
I’ve seen a fair few SRX240s fail with filesystem fsck errors. Sometimes they manage to come back up again, but sometimes the fsck will destroy a critical filesystem like /var and the box will need to be reformatted and Junos reinstalled from the low-level boot manager.
This might be due to a couple of things – they don’t like to be powered off while actively running, and also if there’s a lot of logging to the local flash then over the years the flash can simply wear out and run out of good storage blocks to replace the bad ones. The flash can’t be replaced in the 240, so if this happens then you’ll need to replace the whole box.
I’ve had no problems with the 340s, maybe they’ve got better flash or other hardware, maybe the OS is better. They’re still fairly new to the market so it’s hard to tell at this stage, but so far they seem pretty solid compared to the old 240s.
Thanks for the feedback Kerry. I have upgraded more than 50 SRX340 and haven’t experienced any issue either. Your feedback is also supporting that there seems to be improvement.
SRX240 seems to have caused operational challenges in the field and let’s hope we won’t have it with this platform too.
I have run into an issue with faulty CF, tried to load a media from a different 340 that is healthy but when I copy the media onto the one with faulty CF it just crashes. Can you just replace with a blank CF and load the media on there?