I am running V2.06. I purchased a Full node and a standard weeks ago. From day 1, the full node has not worked. The box disconnects, locks up, and hasn't moved past 15%; numerous connections have been refused. I've reflashed the SD card, performed a format on the SSD drive innumerable times, and even placed two node configuration lines provided by Futurebit support (dbcache=128 and maxmempool=128); both did nothing. I went through all my firewall settings, as I have a Firewall router, and placed the full node IP address in emergency mode, which essentially opens all ports and disables all existing rules and policies that did not work. I connected it directly to my ISP via WIFI, that did not work. At this point, I feel like I'm doing FutureBit's job, and I didn't pay $1,700 to play helpdesk support on my own. I also tried to reflash the SD card to version 2.05, as some stated that the version was much more stable, but that did not work.
The most disappointing experience was that I purchased over $1,700 of equipment and have not received one response from Future Bit for days, except one email, which took almost 4 days to respond. I am incredibly frustrated with the equipment and lack of support.
Yeah, FB support response time is pathetic. Not sure what the issue is...
Unfortunately, service has always been the first area within an organization to suffer the short-sighted and unprepared policies of any company rushing to meet marketing and profit demands. It's repeated time and again, over & over with large and small companies alike. Sometimes it's simply a matter of the "flood & run" approach whereas a company will intentionally start with a few quality pieces and when sales shoot up they switch to inferior pieces and then jump ship and disappear after enough complaints and a huge drop in sales. This is common on AMZ. Now, sometimes it's not as devious or the intention is/was honorable and they simply didn't start out prepared or misunderstand the market base. They get inundated with the service costs related to their misguided, unfortunate, and hopeful outlook. Service time and parts always costs money and NEVER makes a profit. And sometimes, a company is as sincere as professing your feelings to your first love but still can't seem to get it right. But I like to believe there are at least a few companies out there really trying to make a quality product at a fair price and stand behind it after the money has been gathered. However, if they didn't set aside enough for service . . . well, it could be a repeat of a very old story. I, for one, still have a positive outlook on Futurebit.
Cheers!
Most people seem misguided on what FutureBit is. We are not a "company" nor do we have VC money, any profits or marketing department or any of that nonsense. It's literally half a dozen engineers making cool products for home miners.
We do the best with what we have, and that includes not responding to support email for a week during the holidays. Sorry but not sorry.
You get what you pay for, you either get a corporate VC backed shitshow that collects and steals your data and sells all your activity to the highest bidder, or a device that costs double what it costs now to sell in order to have some guy sitting in chat 24/7.
I decided to go the middle ground...keep my independence and mission to decentralize bitcoin, sell hardware at nearly at cost to you guys, with the drawback of not instant support, or cool marketing, or other fancy things that dont move the needle of what we are here for.
Sure if we end up selling a million devices we will need more support, but we are not there yet and we are one of the longest surviving hardware companies in bitcoin because of it.