[outages] Belkin [heartbeat.belkin.com]

[John Neiberger]

I just saw a forum post where Belkin recommended manually setting DNS to
see if that solves the problem. Putting all of this together, this is my
best guess as to what happened.

1. Routers regularly send heartbeat messages to heartbeat.belkin.com
2. Some routing failure causes quite a few netblocks (but not all) to be
unreachable from Belkin's heartbeat server
3. If the heartbeat fails, something breaks related to DNS handling on the
router that does not resolve after a router reset

Very interesting. I don't have enough data yet, but I do wonder if the root
cause of this all is a routing problem on Belkin's side.

John



On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 10:03 AM, John Neiberger <jneiberger at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think it was initially suspected to be a firmware upgrade, but I doubt
> that's the case now. It's interesting to me that there are two seemingly
> unrelated fixes:
>
> 1. Put the IP for heartbeat.belkin.com on a loopback
> 2. Manually add working DNS entries to affected PCs
>
> Reports indicate that either fix works, but why? They seem unrelated to
> one another unless the failing heartbeat messages mess up DNS handling on
> the router.
>
> John
>
> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 9:48 AM, Josh Luthman via Outages <
> outages at outages.org> wrote:
>
>> Where?  I keep reading "bad firmware" problems but everything suggests
>> there is no automatic upgrade and I think we can safely assume resi users
>> didn't upgrade their routers over night.
>>
>>
>>
>> Josh Luthman
>> Office: 937-552-2340
>> Direct: 937-552-2343
>> 1100 Wayne St
>> Suite 1337
>> Troy, OH 45373
>>
>> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 11:35 AM, John Barbieri via Outages <
>> outages at outages.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Funny,
>>>
>>> Just saw something about Belkin routers and a botched firmware upgrade.
>>>
>>> I wonder if this is what they meant.
>>>
>>> That being said, it is working fine from Zito Media in Clanton, AL.
>>>
>>> --John
>>>
>>> On 10/07/2014 10:17 AM, Paul Miller via Outages wrote:
>>>
>>>> On one of my netblocks my subscribers can nolonger ping Belkin.  I can
>>>> ping
>>>> heartbeat.belkin.com from my webservers and from subscriber units on a
>>>> different netblock.
>>>>
>>>> Apparently Belkin routers ping the home base every couple seconds to
>>>> determine
>>>> the correct color of the Internet light on the router (orange or blue
>>>> *sigh*).
>>>> Worse, when it can't ping the Belkin site the router seems to pack up
>>>> and
>>>> redirect my subscribers to their router configuration page.
>>>>
>>>> I found this pretty easy to work around.  I simply DNATed the pings
>>>> intended
>>>> for heartbeat.belkin.com to one of my local nameservers and that seems
>>>> to get
>>>> them back online.  It's a silly workaround, but if anyone else is
>>>> seeing all
>>>> the Belkin routers on their network pack up, this could be why.
>>>>
>>>> -Paul
>>>>
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>>
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