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Linksys/Amazon/Firefox/DNS bug causes router crash

A lot of us have Linksys home routers. They are cheap, effective, and easy to use. I’ve have a BEFSR81 8 port fast ethernet broadband router/firewall for many years… it recently started locking up when anyone in the house shops Amazon.com using Firefox (started in early May we think).

Frequently the router will lock up on pages other than Amazon’s home page; usually while doing DNS queries to get some of the many sub-domains Amazon uses… Occasionally the whole router will crash and I have to reset it to get it working again.

I am running hardware version 3.1 and firmware 2.51.0 (though I swear I applied 2.51.4 update successfully in the past, it’s reporting 2.51.0). While re-applying firmware update this morning the trusty old Linksys died and would not recover.

A mad scramble to get internet again led me to buy a D-Link EBR-2310 from a local Office Depot (how cool that Office Depot carries the entire D-Link line!)… which will give me time to recover the Linksys I hope, and time to research running a linux server with two network ports as a router and firewall.

http://homecommunity.cisco.com/t5/Wired-Routers/BEFSR81-crashes-when-accessing-amazon-com/td-p/333269/page/5 the second to last post on this topic is very informative, and it looks like a DNS specific bug…

I love D-Link’s new line of gear, especially their “EtherGreen” low power high speed gigabit ethernet switches… so I suspect this router from D-Link will be fine, but it only has a four port hub on the LAN side. The Linksys BEFSR81 had an amazing 8 port switch on the LAN side… excellent and still cheap.

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