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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 24 2023, @07:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the oops dept.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/asus-fixes-error-that-caused-mass-router-outage-worldwide-for-2-days/

On Wednesday, Asus router users around the world took to the Internet to report that their devices suddenly froze up for no apparent reason and then, upon rebooting repeatedly, stopped working every few minutes as device memory became exhausted.

Two days later, the Taiwan-based hardware maker has finally answered the calls for help. The mass outage, the company said, was the result of "an error in the configuration of our server settings file." After fixing the glitch, most users needed to only reboot their devices. In the event that didn't fix the problem, the company's support team advised users to save their current configuration settings and perform a factory reset. The company also apologized.
[...]
"On the 16th, Asus pushed a corrupted definition file for ASD, a built-in security daemon present in a wide range of their routers," one person wrote. "As routers automatically updated and fetched the corrupted definition file, they started running out of filesystem space and memory and crashing."

The explanation answered the question of what was causing routers to crash, but it raised a new one: Why were routers affected even when they had been configured to not automatically update and no manual update had been performed? Asus has yet to address this, but the likely answer is that the definitions file for ASD, which resides in memory and scans devices for security threats, gets updated whether or not automatic updates are enabled.


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  • (Score: 2) by Snotnose on Wednesday May 24 2023, @11:04PM (2 children)

    by Snotnose (1623) on Wednesday May 24 2023, @11:04PM (#1308036)

    Looked into that, and another that's for ASUS specifically that I ran across. Neither supports my router (RT AC66U).

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @11:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 24 2023, @11:34PM (#1308043)

    That's what you get for having an Anus router.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday May 25 2023, @07:38AM

    by pTamok (3042) on Thursday May 25 2023, @07:38AM (#1308070)

    That's a shame - but the problem is the manufacturer using proprietary/non-free components, which makes it difficult for the OpenWrt project to support.

    If this bothers you, it might be an idea to see what hardware you can use OpenWrt on, and choose to buy that.

    OpenWrt: Table of Hardware [openwrt.org]

    There are manufacturers that use components that require proprietary drivers, so they grab a copy of OpenWrt, hack things about a bit, and release hardware 'based on' OpenWrt, but which the OpenWrt project can't support without the same access to the drivers. Some even advertise themselves as using OpenWrt, but offer no updates or further support. There has been some heroic reverse-engineering, but some devices are, in addition, so locked down, it is not possible for the average technically competent end user to replace the software supplied by the manufacturer with OpenWrt.