Amber Wrench Light on a Sonicwall TZ-180

I have had several older Sonicwall TZ-180's were the wrench or amber error light comes on/blinks or the Sonicwall suddenly has strange errors. Since these were out of warranty I figured I would open them up. Here is what I found.

As you can see the 2 - 470uf 16v capacitors are swollen. I replaced them with 2 - 470uf 25v capacitors I got from www.badcaps.net. The voltage does not matter as long as it is the same or higher than the old ones. Do not use Capacitors from Radio Shack.

The capacitors cost .67 ea. The repair took 15 minutes. You will need a decent soldering station and a lighted magnifying glass to do the job. See cap removal page on badcaps site on how to replace them. Replace both caps even if one is not swollen. The third green and copper cap can stay if it is not swollen.

I recommend doing a boot to firmware with factory defaults from the settings section. This will clear the memory of any corruption due to the bad caps. You may have to do a boot to safe mode the first time if the Sonicwall was not accessible before the repair. Unplug power hold the reset button down plug in power and continue to hold the button for 30 seconds (no less). Then manually configure your IP to 192.168.168.xxx where xxx is any number except 168. You can then access the Sonicwall on 192.168.168.168. Then do the factory reset.

J.C. Joins Penny

We had to put J.C. down today. She was 19 and suffering from kidney failure. She will be missed.

In 1996 2 months after Kathi's cat Midnight was put down due to kidney failure, we went to the Arizona Humane society to get another cat. J.C. was a 2 or 3 year old cat at the time and was list as not able to get along with other cats. We named her J.C. which stands for "Just Cat". We almost called her Loki as she was always getting in to trouble. She especially like climbing on things.

 We adopted her and shortly afterwards received Penny. Since they were both fighting and tearing up the furniture we had them declawed. If you don't like that we declawed them, keep it to yourself I do not care about your opinion.

We declawed them at the same time and when they came home they got along pretty good. There was the occasional fight but it was like two old ladies with oven mits slapping each other.

When we got her, J.C. liked to suck on your shirt, which we had to stop as it would leave stains. Kathi was afraid to let J.C. go outside, so on the first occasion she did she tied a 100' length of rope to her collar.

Here is a "cat scan" I did of her.

One thing J.C. did that I never got video of, was whenever Kathi would sing J.C thought she was in pain and would come running and respond to Kathi between verses.

2 years ago she started losing weight, her teeth started falling out and she would only eat soft cat food soup. About 6 months ago she was down to 5 pounds and started peeing blood. We had to keep her in the back room and cover everything in plastic as she would pee anywhere. We did not want her to suffer anymore and finally put her down.