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Comment by al2o3cr | Hacker News Reader

My guess? Belkin was routing DNS queries from these boxes through their own infrastructure. For what purpose, who knows.

Evidence is the "workaround" posted on their status page:

"We have identified a workaround that will enable some users to get back online. The workaround requires that you set a static DNS address on the device trying to access the internet."

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Nah, this is the best explanation from a reddit thread, looks like it was pinging heartbeat.belkin.com to verify network connectivity after getting DNS servers from DHCP:

http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ik43h/belkin_fi...

10:40 AM <Duiwel> Just got an e-mail from someone on our Wireless ISP mailing list: We found the routers are sending icmp to heartbeat.belkin.com. Even though we could get a response here at our NOC, the belkins are not receiving it. We added the ip for heartbeat.belkin.com as a loopback address on a router on our network and it becomes

10:40 AM <Duiwel> reachable to all the belkins on our network. Lo, and Behold! They all work again.

10:40 AM <Duiwel> May have to try that

My theory has been that if "the Internet is down" (ping failure to heartbeat.belkin.com) the router does DNS hijacking to show the user a diagnostic page. However, I haven't found a description of what the problem looks like from the Belkin-user's end, so I have no evidence to back that up.

That's a bit freaky. I more-or-less expect my ISP to see all my DNS queries, but not my router manufacturer.

Yep, and those static IPs are for the good ol' Google public DNS servers, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4.

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