Embedded code

From Sean Varley’s weblog:

Apparently the University of Wisconsin and Netgear have a problem.  It looks like Netgear hard coded the SNTP IP address into some embedded devices for network time sync and now the school gets the pleasure of servicing a few hundred thousand requests per second.  You can read about it here.

Wow…seems to me the moral of this story is twofold.

#1 – don’t ship a product that beats the crap out of someone else’s server.

#2 – don’t ship 700,000 units of your product until you’re pretty sure you’ve taken care of #1.

Yikes!

2 Comments

2 thoughts on “Embedded code”

  1. Geek

    Greg, Thanks for posting this! It turns out I have one of the affected Netgear routers and have updated the firmware to address this issue. I probably would never have known if I hadn’t seen it in your blog.

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