Netgear RT-314 Internet Router

Flash! Netgear through poor software practices launches a distributed denial of service attach against the University of Wisconsin. I do not believe this is in any way malicious, but rather through general incompetence. See University of Wisconsin Internet Time Server for details. Netgear made about 700,000 routers with this incompetetent software. The University of Wisconsin is getting messages from 285,000 different IP addresses, sending roughly 250,000 packets per second, which works out to about 150 megabits per second. This has been going on for years.

I bought a Netgear internet router on April fools day, 2001. This should have been a hint of things to come. I bought Netgear because of their good reputation, and the router is a nice sturdy blue metal box, and has a 5 year warranty.

Routers sit between the outside world (like a cable modem or a DSL modem), and an internal network. For home use, they do IP NAT (network address translation), which is a really primitive form of a firewall. Since the internal network address is different than the outside network address, the internal network is somewhat isolated from the outside world. This is good for security, though it isn't nearly as isolated as a stateful firewall, which is available with openbsd, other real operating systems, and high end routers. Routers also allow more than one computer to share an external IP address which is handy for a home with more than one computer.

So I installed my Netgear RT-314 in my local area network, and after a short while, I had it working. The documentation didn't match what it was doing, (there was no web interface) since I had an old version of the software loaded in the router from the factory. But I was able to figure things out.

Early in Feb 2002, I started having problems with my internet connection. It was not obvious what was going on, but after some troubleshooting, it became clear that my router was causing massive problems. I was able to disconnect the router, and use a hub instead, and my internet connection worked perfectly. Now a hub is about as simple and stupid as an Ethernet device gets, and doesn't have the features I want from a router.

The problems I was having were very odd. After freshly booting the router, everything would work fine for 5 to 30 minutes. After that, there would be DNS lookup errors. We tried manually setting the DNS servers to known good servers, but that didn't help. There would also be complete connectivity problems, where I couldn't ping well known sites like yahoo.com and the like by IP address. This indicates that the router can't talk to the outside world at all. If I did a ipconfig/release and an ipconfig/renew (win2k commands) sometimes the connection would get better for 5 to 30 minutes.

I spent much time with Netgear tech support working on the problem. They do have 24*7 tech support, though the first line of techs are in India, and some are pretty clueless, and have a hard time understanding English (though they speak English far better than I speak any Indian language). We tried lots and lots of things, and I probably called them 5 or 6 times for several hours total. We even loaded the latest software, which finally had the web interface the documentation described, but it didn't work any better. Eventually they decided that my router was likely defective, and sent me to the second tier tech support folks in California for a RMA.

I told the techs that I needed a new router cross shipped, and they said no problem, they just needed my credit card number in case I didn't return the broken router. I said no problem, and gave them my number. The new router worked just like the old router, which had serious problems. I called the tech support folks back and spoke to 4 different second tier tech support folks. We tried everything. We even got a third router. They all acted the same.

They suggested that perhaps my ISP had done something that made the router not work. They suggested that my cable modem was incompatible in some way. It seemed to me like they were trying to shift the blame. I asked them to come over, with some network analyzers to see what was really going on. Even though I am within an hours drive, they said they couldn't do it. (Later on, a friend with a different ISP and a different cable modem had the same problems I was having. Also I later bought a new router which is working fine. So the problem was clearly with the Netgear router.)