Routerlogin.net goes to the Internet

TidBITS Talk
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I just tried accessing my Netgear router’s admin page via http://routerlogin.net using Firefox143, and it didn’t work. It went to https://routerlogin.net on the Internet.

This is a Netgear help page, with instructions for how to get to your router’s control panel. If you don’t have a Netgear router, or you’re not on your network, or you’re using a VPN then you can see what I saw.

What’s interesting to me is the cause of the problem. It had nothing to do with http vs. https, or forced https. Nor do any of Netgear’s instructions help.

The actual problem that Firefox has DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) on. So instead of routerlogin.net being resolved by my router’s DNS to my router’s IP address, it got resolved by Cloudflare to the Internet site.

But, Google says that DoH has been on in Firefox for years now. So why did this problem start now? I know it was working 30 days ago, but I did update Firefox last Friday.

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Interesting. At first, I thought maybe some domain squatter took ownership of routerlogin.net, but a whois lookup says the domain has been registered since 2004. But it was last-modified today, so maybe that’s relevant.

You may want to check your Firefox settings to see if some update auto-enabled secure DNS. I just noticed that it is turned on (using Cloudflare) on my Mac, and I never turned it on. As a matter of fact, I explicitly want it off, because I run my own DNS server for my home LAN.

If you didn’t explicitly enable DoH, you may want to disable it. Or at least install routerlogin.net as an exception.