Dead routers which did not die

In the last few months three routers I maintained died on me. All where little home routers. Two of them Asus WL-500GP, and recently a Fonera (first generation). The routers appeared to be live, but could not be reached, neither over Wifi nor Ethernet. The LEDs were lit or sometimes flashing. On the second router, one of the Asus ones, on a closer look it had some strange look, where all LEDs were off shortly, then back to seemingly normal. Sniffing on the Ethernet revealed some strange packages which contained the hex string 0xDEADDEAD and a message to boot into failsafe mode.

Now, to make a long story short: all the routers were just fine, what was indeed broken were the power supplies - on all of those three. Replacing the power supply brought the device back to normal in all three cases. I haven't made an effort to measure what caused this problem, but it seems to be insufficient current.

So next time a (home) router dies on you, consider borrowing a compatible power supply first and test the device again, it might save some money and effort, besides reducing the electronic scrap on the planet.