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Belkin Router Owners Suffering Massive Outages
An anonymous reader writes: ISPs around the country are being kept busy today answering calls from frustrated customers with Belkin routers. Overnight, a firmware issue left many of the Belkin devices with no access to the customer's broadband connection. Initial speculation was that a faulty firmware upgrade caused the devices to lose connectivity, but even users with automatic updates disabled are running into trouble. The problem seems to be that the routers "occasionally ping heartbeat.belkin.com to detect network connectivity," but are suddenly unable to get a response. Belkin has acknowledged the issue and posted a workaround while they work on a fix.
any type of device, they won't get my money for even a power strip.
They earned my boycott honestly years ago. I still haven't let them off the hook. Comments on that article exposed other reasons not to even give them the satisfaction of wiping your ass their products.
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Agreed. I am astonished that this happened. I thought the router companies would have learned their lesson after the SNTP nonsense over a decade ago. Clearly I was mistaken. For those that do not know about that incident, here you go:
http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plon...
Actually, according to links in the article, it DOES still push packets. The issue, specifically, is that it breaks DNS if it can't get it's heartbeat. It's still stupid but the device continues to be a router.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
I think you need to review your boolean logic. !(a && b) is equivalent to !a || !b
"Apple does that too, though on end-user machines. When connecting to wifi, it doesn't enable the connection until it first verifies you're really connected. It does that by trying to pull a specific known Apple URL."
I'm sorry, but there must be more to this than your description.
Just for jollies I unplugged my cable modem and fired up my Macbook. It connected to Wi-Fi and I was up and running on my local network same as always.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
iPhones and iPads definitely exhibit this behavior, but I think only on Wifi networks that do not have any security enabled (which would be most public hotspots). When the login page pops up, it always has a apple URL before quickly switching to the login page's URL.
No, it's a BELKIN. They've been pulling stupid shit like this for the last 10 years at least , so why anyone should still be surprised is beyond me.
Remember that - whatever you buy from them, it'll always be a Belkin first and <device> second.
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
And adding to the list, Windows does it as well. It's called Network Connection Status Indicator.
NCSI is designed to respond to changes in network conditions, and examines the status of a network connection in a variety of ways. First it uses an active probe to determine the status. For example, in an active probe NCSI tests connectivity by trying to reach http://www.msftncsi.com/ a simple Web site that exists only to support the functionality of NCSI. Eventually, as other programs begin generating Internet traffic, NCSI switches to a passive monitoring process that assumes responsibility for detecting changes to the network status.
Every time a network configuration event occurs (meaning that something has changed in the network configuration), the NCSI process performs several tests to identify the network's connectivity status. The first step NCSI performs is a DNS query for www.msftncsi.com. The second step is and HTTP get request for http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.t.... This file is a plain-text file and contains only the text "Microsoft NCSI." Last it will perform a DNS query for dns.msftncsi.com.
The URLs used by NCSI can be changed via Group Policy, i.e. you can have it check for the presence of some local server, so that it doesn't bug the shit out of users on a network without external connectivity. Several weeks ago, Microsoft was having global DNS troubles, and many users reported seeing the "trouble" icon in the tray even though their internet connection was working just fine; the problem was that msftncsi.com wasn't resolving. Whoops.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!