Belkin Router issues this morning?

Tue Oct 7 22:32:56 UTC 2014

While we weren't really impacted by this issue, my understanding is that
the Belkin devices ping 'heartbeat.belkin.com' periodically. If their
pings fail, they do DNS redirection to the device's configuration
interface and alert the user of the error.

It appears that this server went down or had some sort of network issue,
causing the redirect to kick in and users to be unable to access the
Internet.

Any solution that either a) avoids the router's DNS redirection or b)
cause its pings to succeed would restore service.

It looks like Belkin has now re-implemented this service on top of a
DNS-cluster of AWS instances, so I think users are probably back online
now, as the IPs in the initial reports were not AWS and are no longer in
the DNS.

Workarounds include:

a) Add the IP(s) of the heartbeat server as loopbacks on a server/router
within your (service provider) network that will respond to the echos
for your customers
b) Add the hostname 'heartbeat.belkin.com' to the router's host file as
127.0.0.1
c) Modify the DNS configuration of client machines or the Belkin DHCP server

K

On 10/07/2014 03:27 PM, John Neiberger wrote:
> Sounds like it might have been a DNS issue of some sort. The end result was
> that the customer routers couldn't reach their heartbeat server, which made
> them think they weren't on the net. The routers would then be "helpful" and
> redirect all customer port 80 traffic to the router's configuration page to
> correct the "problem".
> 
> It was a big mess that hopefully doesn't happen again. They've been making
> changes to their DNS this afternoon. Looks like they finally have it
> straightened out.
> 
> John
> 
> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Steve Atkins <steve at blighty.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> On Oct 7, 2014, at 8:34 AM, Justin Krejci <jkrejci at usinternet.com> wrote:
>>
>>> https://twitter.com/search?q=%23belkin
>>>
>>> Sounds like a bad firmware update most likely.
>>> Presumably the Belkin routers perform caching DNS for the LAN clients
>> for if the LAN clients use alternate DNS servers (OpenDNS, Google, your
>> ISPs, etc) there are no longer any issues for those devices, as reported by
>> several random people on the Internet.
>>
>> Over on outages, someone mentioned that heartbeat.belkin.com was
>> unreachable from some areas, and that was causing their routers to shut
>> down.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>   Steve
>>
>>