Update on 2023/05/19: ASUS has publicly acknowledged the issue and provided an explanation and workaround of their own (rebooting, or a hard reset if the reboot doesn’t fix it). The original post is below:
When I woke up today around 6:45 AM PDT, I didn’t seem to have internet service available. My phone told me that I was connected to my Wi-Fi network, but it didn’t have connectivity. “Hmm, that’s weird,” I thought. Maybe a fiber cut in the area or something? I looked at my IRC client on my desktop Windows PC, which is nice because it records timestamps of when I lose my connection:
My connection had been down for over 3 hours at this point. Weird! I figured I would log into my ASUS RT-AC86U router’s web interface and see what was going on. Something happened that I wasn’t expecting at all — the page wouldn’t fully load. Portions of it showed the little “sad page” icon indicating a connection error.
I tried to SSH into the router instead. The first few connection attempts failed, and then finally I got in. What I found, though, was that I couldn’t run any commands. It just spit this error back at me:
-sh: can't fork
OK, so something was really messed up. I decided to power cycle the router at this point. Maybe some weird glitch happened or something. Which would be odd — this router has been pretty rock solid since I’ve had it, aside from 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi issues over time. That’s another story I don’t want to get into today.
Anyway, when the router came back up everything seemed fine. But then, 40 minutes later, my connection dropped again with the same symptoms.
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