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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.
Yeah, we sold an untold number of plastic boxes that don't work correctly if we ever stop responding to pings... Why would that ever be a problem? Companies never go bankrupt, deliberately kill old products, or 'change strategic direction'.
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.
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Dude, such a wasted opportunity to say "Master of your own domain ".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Looks like you were behind a Belkin router.
Many years ago I had a similar problem with Comcast. Their system's DHCP wasn't giving me an address, so I called the tech support number. The person on the phone told me that he couldn't help me with my problem since help with all DHCP issues was only handled through their new online text chat system. I pointed out that I couldn't get to their handy online text chat system because I COULDN'T GET AN IP ADDRESS. His only response was that maybe I could use a neighbor's computer. Sigh.
Entertainingly enough, I've run into this issue before. You will encounter the same issue when trying to connect the affected Belkin routers through the Cisco Clean Access NAC here (AKA Campus Housing), because devices are quarantined in the VLAN ghetto until successfully authenticated and associated.
So, these terrible, terrible Belkin routers try to phone home, and when they are unsuccessful they redirect all HTTP requests to the router's administration page. Since sessions are required to authenticate via HTTPS, there is no way to login. Extensive investigation revealed no way to disable this behavior on the client side, SOP for anyone calling with connection problems involving a Belkin router became "Officially unsupported. Return it and get something else that isn't a Belkin."
I am beyond pleased that this incredibly foolish decision on Belkin's part has come back to bite them in general, and hilariously entertained to see that Belkin's temporary workaround was effectively "spoof DNS traffic to heartbeat.belkin.com to a server on your local network that will pingback to fix your ISP's broken clients"
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
I think you need to review your boolean logic. !(a && b) is equivalent to !a || !b
I wrote scripts to do ADSL load-balancing / failover using kernel patches that allowed all kinds of things that aren't in the base kernel. Problem was that our ADSL modems were sucky and wouldn't bring the connection back up when it could have done, so I stuck a £5 Velleman electronics kit and a couple of relays into a box, and with USB control we could reset them from the router itself.
It ran a school for 5+ years, even able to stick 3G sticks into the list and let it failover to them when a dead connection was spotted. And, handily, the 3G sticks worked as a perfect "text-to-fix" receptor and also sent out and received text messages on behalf of the school at the same time. Hell, in one emergency, we even just bought a shed-load of SIMs and every time we hit 1Gb data on a SIM, it turned it off, we changed the SIM for the next and threw the first one away (to get around stupid low data limits). We literally didn't have anyone know we'd done it, from inside the school, except myself and the bursar who bought the SIMs. Everything just worked seamlessly.
But, just watch number of packets incoming on connection. It's much easier. If your external DNS is down, you aren't going anywhere anyway, without manual intervention. If the root DNS is down, you're fucked. If traceroute can't trace to your ISP's gateway, you're probably dead anyway. All of these work, there's no need to get too complex and ping-out.
So if you aren't getting DNS packets coming back from simple queries, you might as well consider the connection dead and move onto the next. That's what we did. Then a few second later you'd hear a click, the lights would flash on one of the modems, and in a couple of minutes it's would be back up and pass traffic again.
The biggest problem? We had to put TWO IP's on the external VPN list because you were never quite sure what line was up and handling the route for the VPN. It could be either. Plug both in, let the VPN client try both. End of problem.
Was so sad when I realised that I'd left the hardware and scripts for that at my previous workplace.