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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

Bigger problems that my entire home internet connection essentially being gone?

The router is a brick now, the worst that can happen is that it’ll be a brick after.

In fairness, it's not really a brick. You can reboot it and use the internet for tens of minutes at a time, and during that time, you can log into the web UI and click "install upgrade" to permanently fix the issue.

My last router was an Asus. It was the best one I'd ever had, not counting an old 25MHz 386 that booted Linux off a floppy disk. The new one (PC Engines + OpenBSD) is better, though, starting two days ago, something keeps kicking my Mac off my unifi wifi networks (full WiFi signal, no connection, all other devices work, and the mac can talk to the starlink WiFi).

My spare MacBook Air (2011) had recently started to drop off one of the WiFi after 10-15 seconds. It works fine on another WiFi and all the other devices seem to be fine on both.

There's no upgrade available for my AP (ASUS ZenWiFi AC Mini CD6) and "upgrading" manually using the current FW from ASUS webpage didn't fix the issue.

The latest version available is 3.0.0.4.386.49693 from 2022/07/21.

Source: https://www.asus.com/pl/networking-iot-servers/whole-home-me...

>an old 25MHz 386 that booted Linux off a floppy disk.

inquiring minds want to know...how long did that boot take?

In this case yes, but don't forget that there are much worse things routers can be than a brick. They can be a man-in-the-middle, botnet node for ddos, etc.

If the router is not usable by the person who bought it, it is not likely to remain connected to the internet for a theoretical botnet attack.

Wow! You just reminded me that our Roku stick is still plugged in after 3-6 months of being forgotten.

I wonder how many TB of "family isn't watching television; advertise funeral homes to relatives and travel insurance packages to primary user" it has sent home in that time.

I'd be interesting to know what percentage of internet routers are plugged in and forgotten on a disused internet connection at any given time. I'd guess ~ 1%, and that the percentage will increase as wireless broadband gets more popular.

Home routers can be disconnected from thr Net if there is no payment for the services. There were a bunch of ES47, DS20, DS15 along with HP MSA1000 and some others I don't remember, which were still connected and running the last time I saw them, which was in 2018. At least they were on the LAN.

If there's a fix, then it's not really a brick.

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