Your Steam Deck disrupted your internet connection.
Your Steam Deck disrupted your internet connection.
In reality, it might have been my Linksys router, though someone responded to a Mastodon post I made mentioning similar issues, leaving me uncertain about who to hold accountable. Nonetheless, I own the official Steam Deck dock from Valve and rely on it frequently. It’s physically connected to an unmanaged Linksys SE3005 switch placed behind the TV. This device allows direct wiring for the TV, PC, Steam Deck dock, and my Nintendo Switch dock. Last night I was using the Dock in desktop mode with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Firefox was open, streaming a YouTube video, but I paused it briefly while doing another task. The screen went to sleep, yet the Deck remained active. Eventually, I chose to turn off the dock and powered down the cable. After some time, my daughter entered and mentioned that Plex on her Kodi box couldn’t play the next episode. I suggested it might just be a glitch in Plex and advised her to exit the app. She didn’t respond, so I went to sleep. Later, around 4:30 AM, I received alerts from my phone; emails from UptimeRobot reported Plex, Nextcloud, etc., were down. Initially, I assumed it was a quick reboot since the server auto-installs updates and performs them at that hour. However, it rebooted too fast for UptimeRobot to detect. I waited a few minutes, then tried pinging my server—no response. I believed it might be an automatic restart, given the setup. But the issue persisted. Eventually, I checked the router and discovered all link indicators were erratic. My phone lost WiFi connection even though networks appeared visible, repeatedly failing to connect. The server itself was operational, but the router suffered. All link lights flared erratically, my phone disconnected from WiFi despite network visibility, and it kept attempting connections without success. Pings were delayed by several seconds. I powered down the router, then connected my laptop for troubleshooting. It worked temporarily for about five seconds before crashing again. I moved to a different location and tried connecting via the server. After some adjustments—power cycling the router, resetting OpenWRT, and reconfiguring settings—I managed to get things running. Eventually, I disconnected my ISP modem and considered a DDoS attack, but nothing worked. I also suspected a configuration hiccup with OpenWRT. I flashed it years ago and kept old settings, which triggered a warning about incompatibility. After some manual tweaks, the system rebooted into a stable state. It was functional for roughly 20 to 30 seconds before failing again. I wondered if one of my devices was interfering. I unplugged everything except my laptop, powered down the router, and then connected it back. The link light stabilized, though it stopped blinking. I checked the router, PiHole, server, and eventually reconnected the cable in the living room. The issue seemed tied to the living room setup—once I unplugged the cable from the dock, the link light returned and stayed steady. Oddly enough, the TV, Switch, and PC were off, while the Steam Deck was completely disconnected. The only active indicator was the dock’s blinking light. I eventually traced the problem to a possible infinite loop caused by data in transit at that moment, possibly due to the official dock’s logic or the switch. I reset the switch, performed a factory reset on OpenWRT, and reconfigured everything manually. I also enabled extra protections like SYN flood defense and firewall rules to block invalid packets. Now I’m left with some uncertainty about the exact cause, but I thought sharing this might help others avoid similar situations. I posted a short video explaining the whole incident.
Brings to mind the instance when I was summoned to the animal shelter I help out at, since their whole system crashed. A brief Wireshark analysis revealed the credit card terminal became extremely active and overloaded the network as soon as it connected.
I've noticed something comparable that looked like a broadcast storm coming through my Sony surround receiver. When I switched it to Wi-Fi instead of using a wired connection, it stopped working right away when I unplugged the USB Ethernet adapter. I suspect the device might have gotten stuck in an unstable state because of the hub connection. Placing the Steam Deck to sleep could help, but I'm not sure if that would make things worse.