PSA: Back up your router configuration

Source

So as we finally signed off on Fedora 20 Beta this morning (with so much handwaving I felt like my shoulder was about to come off at the joint), and I looked forward to a slightly quiet morning... ...my router spontaneously decided to reset itself to factory settings. That. That. Did not. Amuse. Me. This illustrated a hitherto undiscovered weakness in my backup strategy: I didn't have the router configuration backed up. PSA: folks, back up your router configuration. Seriously. A morning spent remembering and re-entering static leases, port forwards and FreeIPA DNS records does not rank highly among my Most Entertaining Of All Time. I think the show is back on the road now, but there will inevitably be that one thing I forgot to do which will come back and bite me in the ass in two weeks...

Comments

eggplant wrote on 2013-11-08 06:13:
Is it usual event for routers? I occasionally encounter this and used to think probably some malicious program is at work!! Downloading the Beta, hope will work well. Thanks for your works... :)
emmet.curran wrote on 2013-11-08 11:22:
you love it Adam. i bet you secretly hope some of your stuff will break so you get to fix it all over again :)
Samantha Carencarn wrote on 2013-11-08 14:22:
My boyfriend's switches at work did that once. Dumped everything and he had to rebuild vlan trunks and a bunch of other things that a lowly programmer like myself could never fathom. He backs stuff up now.
adamw wrote on 2013-11-08 16:54:
Samantha: owch :/ I do try quite hard to back stuff up these days, just backing up the router config never even occurred to me for some reason... eggplant: I wouldn't say 'usual', this is the first time I've ever seen it happen. But I don't believe I had it configured for access beyond the firewall at all, so I don't think malicious action could've been involved; I'm more inclined to put it down to a bug in the router or dd-wrt. (No, I'm not running one of the known-hackable dd-wrt configurations).