Lost 8 hours because of a hidden default setting in my firewall

I spent an entire Saturday last month trying to figure out why my home server kept dropping connections every 10 minutes. Turned out the firewall on my router had a default setting that blocked ICMP packets after a certain threshold. I must have rebooted that thing 15 times before I thought to look at the actual config file. The problem was right there in black and white, but the web interface didn't even show that setting. Who has time to dig through a command line for basic troubleshooting? I'm still annoyed that a product aimed at "easy setup" would hide something so crucial. Has anyone else dealt with a router that just silently killed your traffic like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

emerychen12d ago

Man, that hits close to home. I had a similar nightmare with a consumer Asus router that had a "professional" tab hidden two clicks deep in a submenu. The thing was silently killing my SSH sessions after 60 seconds of idle time because of a "Green Ethernet" power saving feature that was turned on by default. Nobody tells you that "energy efficient" means your SSH sessions will drop constantly. I found it by accident when I was poking around the WAN settings.

gavin_clark12d ago

My buddy had the exact same thing happen with his RT-AC68U six years back. Took him a full weekend to figure out why his work VPN kept dropping at exactly 60 seconds idle.