When reset doesn't ... reset?

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A friend asked me to change his WiFi password — too many neighbors had it, and he suspected they were leeching off him. Simple enough, except he’d forgotten the router’s admin login. No problem, I thought. Factory reset, use the default credentials printed on the sticker, done in two minutes.

It was not done in two minutes.

Attempt One: Reset That Wasn’t

I held the reset pinhole until all the lights on the router blinked off, let go, and waited for it to come back up. Once it did, I tried the default credentials from the sticker.

They didn’t work.

Weirder — the PC plugged directly into the router via LAN cable had no internet either. Not WiFi, not wired, nothing. That’s the part that actually stumped me for a bit, because a dead WiFi password is one thing, but a wired PC losing connectivity too meant something deeper was off.

Here’s what I didn’t realize at the time: holding the reset button until the lights go out just means the router rebooted — it doesn’t confirm a factory reset actually happened. Most consumer routers need the button held for a specific duration (often 10+ seconds, sometimes longer) before they actually wipe the NVRAM config. A shorter hold can just power-cycle the device instead of resetting it.

So I wasn’t logging into a fresh, default router at all. I was logging into the exact same router, with my friend’s forgotten custom password still fully intact. The default creds never had a chance of working.

Attempt Two: Actually Waiting

Second try, I held the button for a genuinely long time — well past the point where the lights went out — and then just… waited. Didn’t touch anything.

A minute or two later, a YouTube tab that had been sitting open the whole time suddenly started playing audio on its own. Nobody clicked anything. The network had just quietly come back to life in the background.

That’s DHCP doing its job. Here’s the sequence that was actually happening, invisibly, the whole time:

The reset genuinely wiped the config this time, restoring the router to factory defaults — which is why the sticker credentials finally worked.
DHCP service takes time to come back online after a real reset — not just the interface, but the actual service that hands out IP addresses.
The PC’s DHCP client was sitting there requesting a lease the entire time and getting nothing back, because the router’s DHCP server wasn’t up yet to respond.
The moment the DHCP server came online, it answered the PC’s next DHCP request, handed out a lease, and the PC silently picked up a valid IP — no reconnect, no manual renewal, nothing. The song just started because the network stack quietly finished its job in the background.

The Actual Lesson

The mistake wasn’t router weirdness — it was assuming a short button hold equals a full reset, when the first attempt was really just a reboot. And even after a genuine reset, DHCP lease negotiation and service startup aren’t instant; they take real time that’s easy to mistake for “something’s broken” when really it’s just “something’s still booting.”

Small, dumb, easily fixed moment — but it’s the kind of thing that sticks with you a lot better than reading “DHCP assigns IP addresses” in a textbook ever did.

DHCP | Ahmed Portfolio

When reset doesn't ... reset?

Attempt One: Reset That Wasn’t

Attempt Two: Actually Waiting

The Actual Lesson