Tuesday, November 15, 2005
D-Link DI-524 Airforce One 54.g Wireless Router
When I decided to buy a laptop, I knew I’d have to buy a wireless router. Well with the prices of wireless routers crashing, I bought the DLINK DI-524 wireless router on an impulse when buying my Acer Aspire 5002WLMI Laptop.
When I did get a chance to read reviews on this router (prior to opening it), I was disappointed. There was lot of bad press surrounding this router although the D-LINK site had excellent words on its product. Yeah right!!
Anyway it was too late to return it and I decided to use it anyway. What the heck. To my pleasant surprise, the router worked right out of the box. The Ethernet switch worked like a charm churning out IP addresses without hitches. All excited, I configured my access point and tried to connect wirelessly. Well guess what – it failed!! That’s right, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to connect wirelessly. I configured all the correct settings but nothing worked.
After toying with it for 10 minutes, when I started to get that feeling deep in my pit, suddenly it occurred to me that I check with the D-LINK website for a firmware update. Well surprise surprise, sure enough; there was a recent firmware update for this exact router!
Immediately I downloaded, flashed my router and waited with bated breath as it restarted. Voila – my wireless link was up. My laptop picked up the SSID and connected to it automatically. What a delightful feeling!!
Fully pleased, I proceeded to setup basic WIFI security like disabling SSID broadcast, turning on 128 bit WEP encryption with shared key, stealthing port 113 (IDENT) using port forwarding (virtual server menu), enabling MAC filters and restricting DHCP ranges. There is also an option to disable radio, thereby turning off wireless altogether. Very useful,if you need to create a network with no wireless clients.
It’s been working out of the box ever since and is one of the easiest of routers to configure. I must add that am extremely pleased with router though the range of this router can be limited. One of the features that I love is that setting in the router to automatically reconnect your PPPOE connection (DSL) when it disconnects, nicely simulating an always on internet connection.
The only issue that I might have is with the router time always defaulting to Apr 2002. This can be a pain while reviewing logs. Overall – a wonderful product from DLINK for as little as 35$ approx (after mail-in rebates). ¶ 00:37
When I did get a chance to read reviews on this router (prior to opening it), I was disappointed. There was lot of bad press surrounding this router although the D-LINK site had excellent words on its product. Yeah right!!
Anyway it was too late to return it and I decided to use it anyway. What the heck. To my pleasant surprise, the router worked right out of the box. The Ethernet switch worked like a charm churning out IP addresses without hitches. All excited, I configured my access point and tried to connect wirelessly. Well guess what – it failed!! That’s right, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to connect wirelessly. I configured all the correct settings but nothing worked.
After toying with it for 10 minutes, when I started to get that feeling deep in my pit, suddenly it occurred to me that I check with the D-LINK website for a firmware update. Well surprise surprise, sure enough; there was a recent firmware update for this exact router!
Immediately I downloaded, flashed my router and waited with bated breath as it restarted. Voila – my wireless link was up. My laptop picked up the SSID and connected to it automatically. What a delightful feeling!!
Fully pleased, I proceeded to setup basic WIFI security like disabling SSID broadcast, turning on 128 bit WEP encryption with shared key, stealthing port 113 (IDENT) using port forwarding (virtual server menu), enabling MAC filters and restricting DHCP ranges. There is also an option to disable radio, thereby turning off wireless altogether. Very useful,if you need to create a network with no wireless clients.
It’s been working out of the box ever since and is one of the easiest of routers to configure. I must add that am extremely pleased with router though the range of this router can be limited. One of the features that I love is that setting in the router to automatically reconnect your PPPOE connection (DSL) when it disconnects, nicely simulating an always on internet connection.
The only issue that I might have is with the router time always defaulting to Apr 2002. This can be a pain while reviewing logs. Overall – a wonderful product from DLINK for as little as 35$ approx (after mail-in rebates). ¶ 00:37