My printer wouldn’t work tonight.
After some unproductive fiddling around, I finally figured out it was because my router had wiped its own brain. Tabula rasa, baybee. Its SSID was linksys again, and wide open. So my printer was trying to get on the network with credentials that no longer existed. (Remarkably, no one had tried to use the wireless network and reported failure in the meantime.)
A cursory Binging reveals that routers sometimes do this with erratic power. My UPS needs a battery, and we’ve had some intermittent outages, so that fits.
I mess with networking just infrequently enough for it to piss me off to have to think about it. It’s pretty reliable day to day, right? So it just fades into the landscape, right? Once in a while you need to kill power to the router and modem for a minute, but when you plug them back in it’s all good, right?
So I managed to get to the router settings, and made Big Mistake #1: failure to realize that I could simply copy the old security key from one of the connecting devices back into the router, and everything would just work again. No, I generated a new one and then set about putting it into tablets, game consoles, streaming boxes, laptops, phones…sigh.
If you’re at all nerdy, I could ask you to estimate the number of devices hitting your Wi-Fi, and you’d underestimate it by half.
I’d fought with the printer already enough to be frustrated, and some time before I realized it, made Big Mistake #2: resetting the printer’s network configuration. It occurred to me after I’d already propagated the new key to several devices that I could put the old key back in the router. Hey, the printer would work again. Ha! I’d already mucked with it too much. The printer didn’t know the old key anymore. I’d have loved to have the printer working and have to put the old key back into everything I’d already reconfigured. But, nope.
So, fix it. Perhaps counterintuitively, the printer needs a USB connection to the computer to enable a wireless connection. I need a male-male Type A USB cable for this. My stash contains every USB cable in the universe but that one.
And so I made Big Mistake #3: leaving the house at 11 pm thinking I’d be able to purchase such a cable. I’m embarrassed at how long I was gone so I’m not going to get too far into the narrative, but I’ll admit for your perverse pleasure that I went in two different locations of one of my least favorite places in the world. (Hatred recharged.)
I get uniquely unsettled when my tech isn’t working. I mean, I’m bothered. I can’t turn loose of it as long as I think I can recover. I should have been horizontal two hours ago. But I kept thinking I could get it back before I went to bed.
And then I spent 30 more minutes writing this post. That’s probably Big Mistake #4.
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A few (lengthy) thoughts from a fellow nerd:
The fact that your router wiped itself, could certainly be caused by the power issues. However, there are three other things that can possibly be culprits here:
Potential Culprit #1. The router needs a full wipe and reflash. A router is just as much a computer as any of the devices we all use on a daily basis to enjoy and consume our digital lives. Most routers run a very stripped down specialized flavors of Unix or Linux. As with any other device running something as sophisticated as a modern operating system, things can get muddied up over time. All sorts of operating anomalies, from the physical word of things like power outages, over/under voltages, etc) to the software side of things such as malformed datagrams and buffers filling up/overflowing, may each be handled individually over time without causing issue, but the combination of all of them over time can put things in a funky state that’s just never been documented well enough to be coded for. And as with our daily hands on consumer devices, sometimes, the best thing to do is just wipe it and reload.
I’ll refer back to these next two paragraphs a few times. Just pointing that out.
Just “resetting to defaults” via the web interface doesn’t count. That’s considered a “soft wipe”. Since you have a Linksys (great brand!), I believe the procedure is to do what’s called a 30-30-30 reset, then flash new firmware (of course find the latest), then once it boots the new firmware properly, go ahead and do another 30-30-30 for good measure.
The above process takes roughly 10 minutes once you’ve find the correct firmware. Depending on the complexity of your configuration, overall project time to reflash as described above then reconfigure should be anywhere from 20 minutes for a “simple set new wifi settings and done” to 45 minutes for super complex and particular nerdy configs, like I do.
Potential Culprit #2. Your router is failing. This just happens. Stuff wears out. I don’t think there exist any digital storage medium (EEPROMS, the various flavors of flash memory and ram, as well as hdds) that doesn’t have a measurable mean time before failure. Circuitry wears and corrodes over time. Capacitors age and pop. Sometimes it’s just time to take it out back and “Office Space” it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLk-3HPS12Q#t=38) then head to your favorite electronics distributor and buy a shiny new one.
Tip: As of this comment, Best Buy will price match Amazon. If you find a model you like on Amazon for a reasonable price, that your local Best Buy carries, you can show the cashier the price on Amazon from your smart phone and they will, no questions asked, override the price on the spot. No manager approval required. This is actually how I’ve bought a lot of my most recently purchased networking gear, as well as a my Chromecast. The only difference is you pay sales tax (which you’re technically supposed to pay for Amazon purchases as well via self reporting to the state every year… right…?) Props to Best Buy for being a good competitor!
If, in its current state, your router fails again, try the reflashing process described above with the simplest “just set wifi SSID and password” and see if it is stable after a week or so. If it behaves for a week, then do any more particular settings to your hearts content if needed and see if that causes it to fail in a short period of time.
This was actually a problem I had once. One of my nerdy particular settings I was trying to use was making my router behave as if it was failing. Once I fully reflashed it (as described above) and just did the simplest settings required to operate Wifi safely/responsibly, it worked fine which narrowed it down to firmware bugs. Eventually, I narrowed it down to a particular feature and gave me very particular google criteria which lead me to a dark corner of a forum where the bug was documented. I was using an after market, 3rd party firmware, which has those kinds of issues more often. Manufacturer issued firmwares are usually much more stable (I now use this on my primary router), but on rare occasion can have these issues.
Given the cost of a new router, definitely worth making sure first before beginning the above mentioned “Office Space” ceremony.
Potential Culprit #3. This one is, in my opinion, the most serious potential culprit: your router has been exploited. This is actually a trend right now among internet bad guys (going after routers). They either accidentally triggered a soft wipe, or did it on purpose since defaults are much more documented and thus more thoroughly exploitable. A compromised consumer router is incredibly valuable in the blackhat (bad guy) world. Here’s why:
(I apologize in advance for this lengthy explanation of bad guy habits. It’s very scary. It’s unfortunately, very true)
The router is the gateway for an entire house hold; that’s actually a technical term for it. So every bit of traffic between a device behind the router (like your smart phone or computer) and the internet we operate on passes through the router. Remember, under the hood, it’s unix/linux. It’s trivial to log traffic or tweak deep, under-the-hood settings that aren’t exposed via the web interface, completely negating much of the perceived security we think we have.
If you haven’t every noticed, next time you’re at work and on a website that’s https (do https://www.google.com for example), click on the little lock icon in the address bar and read closely who the certificate is issued by. At my house, it says “GeoTrust Global CA”. At work, it will not say that… The reason is, many work places effectively man-in-the-middle secure connections so they can still snoop the traffic “secure” web traffic. A good number of businesses do still exempt more sensitive sites like online banking. Point being, a bad guy who controls your router is just about as capable of doing the same thing, without the courtesy if ignoring banking sites.
On top of that, a compromised router is, literally (I know how to use this word still… right?), a digital weapon on the internet. Let’s say you have 30Mbps of download bandwidth and 5Mbps of upload bandwidth. If your router is compromised, now all of that bandwidth is at the disposal of whoever controls it.
Bad guys that are successful usually have numbers of compromised devices on the scale of 10’s of thousands all the way up to millions. Let’s just say bad guy has a conservative 10,000 devices compromised, each with the same 30/5 internet connection. Now he/she has 50Gbps of upload bandwidth (upload is the most valuable) at their disposal, typically used for bulk spamming and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
DDoS attacks have become popular lately and are making headlines as well. The idea is, just throw so much junk traffic at a target so that it can’t respond to legitimate traffic in a timely manner. “Timely” on the internet is actually as little as fractions of a second, so if something takes more than a second to respond to a request, systems will start assuming things are offline.
50 Gbps of raw bandwidth, alone, is massive and can’t be handled by any internet service that isn’t on the scale of a Google, Facebook, or Amazon. Even big services like those will bend a bit and have issues, potentially still falling off for a while. More recent example that had impact to every day users was the XBox Live/Playstation Network DDoSes over the holidays.
There are even companies out there that claim to offer services to protect from DDoSes, but I’ve yet to see any of them work successfully. Usually, they fail to come through because their protections are actually bypassed.
But the other reason the protections fail and anything can be brought down is: the bad guys don’t just get 50Gbps of attack bandwidth from these 10k compromised devices. There are techniques to amplify the bandwidth of the attacks. A quick search turns up one place these techniques impact are documented: https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/alerts/TA14-017A . The top amplification listed is 556.9x amplification. So now that 50Gbps has turned into 27.8 Tbps (Terabits per second, one Terabit being 1000 Gigabits). If they’re more successful bad guys and have a million devices instead of 10,000, that adds up to 2.78 Pbps (Petabits per second, one Petabit being 1000 Terabits or 1,000,000 Gigabits).
Yea… nothing survives that. That’s enough bandwidth to saturate entire portions of the internet.
Your download bandwidth is marginally useful for transporting data that the bad guys don’t want passing through or tracing back to their own resources because it’s probably illegal. Effectively they’ll just route their traffic through it so that it “bounces” around the internet so much it’s difficult to trace back to its origin. Standard practice is to try and bounce between devices in a number of countries that aren’t on agreeable terms so that search warrants following the trail have no chance.
They might only utilize a compromised device during non-peak usage times, based on its locality. That way the legitimate users don’t notice any impact to their internet service and never suspect anything.
Take of your foil hats though. It’s not too difficult to practice safe interwebz.
The best practice here is to keep your router’s firmware up to date. Computer and network security is finally starting to find its way into headlines much more, thus getting more attention from manufactures trying to avoid the headlines. So manufacturers are issuing patches much more often than they used to. Good guys (whitehats) are also becoming more numerous and working to find and report issues responsibly to the manufacturers so they can issue fixes before their ever exploited.
If you really want to start from scratch and know you’re starting out as clean and as safe as possible, do the reflashing process I described above. But if your router seems to be behaving as far as you can tell, just use the web interface to upgrade to the latest firmware available on the manufacturer’s website. This simple firmware upgrade sometimes doesn’t wipe settings, so you might not even have to redo settings (that’s not a guarantee, it differs per manufacturer and device).
If you keep your router up to date with reasonable wifi security and don’t open up unnecessary holes in your router’s firewall/NAT tables; you’ve done just about all you can at that point. If a bad guy still gets in, they were just going to get in. Nothing else you could have done… Hopefully, how they get in is discovered and patched in a timely manner. There are much more advanced ways to still protect your personal information in a compromised situation. That’s another novella though. There’s also no where in the world that holds bystandard owners of weaponized network devices liable, so no worry there (I honestly doubt this will ever be an issue).
/ScaryTime
Should you or any of your readers ever be interested in further discussion of anything consumer IT and tech security, it’s my “hobby” of sorts and I’m always up for discussion. If it isn’t obvious by this comment… I could go on for days…
Tahm, congratulations. You have captured the BoWilliams.com comment length record and shall almost certainly hold it indefinitely. 🙂
I appreciate all the good info, and I know my readers do too. In my specific case, I’ve convicted the UPS, however. It just acted up again, and >poof!< went the router's brain again. I've removed the UPS entirely now and put a sub in until the real replacement gets here Tuesday.
That’s definitely viable culprit. Roughly falls under culprit #1.
I have a UPS I’m slightly suspicious of too. It rather regularly makes the “click” noise like it’s switch from AC (the power outlet its plugged into) to DC (its battery) and then a few seconds later, back again. But it’s giving no alarm or other complaint via its display.
It’s powering a rather important piece of equipment, so I may experiment to see if I can figure out what the issue is.
OK, so are you ready for the grand finale dumbass thing I did?
I was trying to make the USB connection from the printer to the computer with the USB port on the front of the printer–which is for plugging in a thumb drive to print photos from.
The USB connection for the printer itself is on the back of the unit. It’s a female type B.
So a male type A/male type B cable is what I needed all along.
I might have seven of them, and certainly didn’t need this male A/male A cable that I just plugged in and couldn’t make work.
This is the most airheaded thing I’ve done in some time.
On the plus side, the printer is back on the network.