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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.
Did Belkin tell you their router was dependent on their site being up?
"When I die, the world ends." - Belkin policy
No router should ever be dependent on phoning home to a server in order to work. (No router should be engaging in any communication at all that I haven't told it to!) This is BAD - Broken As Designed. I'm awfully glad that I don't use Belkin stuff.
Yeah! Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?
Sounds more like "all of the internets is broken because this one site won't work" complaint I get all the time.
It's a ROUTER. If the physical link is up then try pushing packets through it. That's all.
If you want to show connectivity to a specific site then show that in the diagnostic page on that router. But keep pushing packets.
And they bought Linksys from Cisco. Deep sigh.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
I think the most awesome revelation about this whole thing is that you can stop a lot of people from accessing the internet if you simply DDoS heartbeat.belkin.com.