D-Link DSL-504 ADSl Router
Aug 10 '01
The Bottom Line You should make sure you have all your required settings at hand before undertaking your venture to the high speed WAN!
We have always used D-Link network cards, hubs and switches in all of our computer network installations, but we only recently found out that they have been pushing very strongly into the broadband market for some time now.
A quick phone call to D-Link, some paperwork signed off and a few flurries of email saw their top of the range DSL-504 arrived on our doorstep in a box that was huge! Thankfully, on opening we found it was mostly packing and a nice D-link emblazoned box was soon pulled from the mass of packaging material!
The DSL-504 come is a fairly large box, complete with an 8-page quick installation guide, a CD with two .pdf documents on it (the quick install guide and the user guide), the DSL-504 router, power pack, CAT 5 network cable, ADSL connection cable and a 9 pin serial lead. The serial lead is there in case you need to access the router directly through the COM ports of the pc via telnet, so keep this handy as you never know just when something might happen and you need it!
Reading through the quick start manual, the first thing to be done was to connect the power unit and switch the router on. After that, connect the CAT 5 cable to an Ethernet port on the back and the other end into the network card on the PC you are going to use to configure the router up, and then turn the PC on. After that, you connect the phone line cable into the back of the unit, and the other end into the ADSL port on your wall socket.
Because of the nature of our original setup, we used a workstation that had the IP setting set to automatically obtain IP address. Had I connected the server to the hub, there would have been an immediate conflict because both systems have DHCP enabled, and both items would have latched into 192.168.0.1. Something to remember if you have an IP conflict in setting this kind of unit up on a LAN.
You have to make sure that the PC you are using has IP set up, and the quick start guide shows you exactly what to do, it’s really very simple to set up if you are required to do so. So, after that you start the computer up, the system loads in and then you launch your web browser to configure the unit for broadband access.
The settings used are aimed at BTOPENWORLD customers, so please check with your ISP before hand on the settings you will require to get everything up and running. When we got to this stage we soon realised that we only had our logon name and password, and any other settings would have to be found from BT, but knowing that they offer no technical support on equipment they don’t supply, we opted to rummage around the Internet, get a list of settings we reckoned we would need, and then came back to launching the web browser!
By typing http://192.168.0.1 into the address bar of the browser, you are greeted by the routers logon screen. A quick click onto the bar takes you into the management module of the router, but only after you supply the Administrator username and password. By default these are set to a username of admin, and the same for the password.
Please be aware that you should change this password before you go live onto the Internet simply because if you don’t there is the chance of someone visiting you IP address and logging into your router and causing you no end of problems!
After you supply the details you are taken to the main part of the management module, but first of all you want to set the connection type to PPPoA as this is what we require to access BTOPENWORLD.
You have three choices on the connection type, PPPoE, RFC1483 and PPPoA to choose from, but we have to make sure it’s set to PPPoA before we start to configure the settings.
It’s all very neatly laid out, and all you have to do is supply the correct information to get yourself up and running…. If you read the paper manual it does point out that you need to contact your ISP for certain details, but one thing we did notice is that the settings for the VPI and the VCI are different from the paper and CD based documents, so it really is necessary to get the required info BEFORE you start.
As mentioned previously, the D-Link manual states two different settings as being default, so it’s worth checking this section if you have any difficulty connecting. Once these setting are in, you have to click OK and then SAVE CHANGES. Unless you click the SAVE CHANGES button, nothing will be stored; so don’t miss this part out!
From the moment we had all the setting keyed in and checked, and the router logging into the BTOPENWORLD system everything appeared to work perfectly but then we encountered the first stumbling block of NAT, our web and ftp servers did not work to users in the outside world!
A quick double click of the user manual showed us that this is part of the security feature of a NAT based router, and that we would have to allocate the ports we wished to use on the system in the PORT RE-DIRECTION side of the router configuration screen.
PROBLEMS ENCOUNTERED
Now, what followed has us tearing our hair out for two days as we had been running various tests with people on dial up accounts, and the FTP side of things worked fine, even with the non standard ports being used on our FTP server. When it came to users with routers and cable modems, we encountered a problem that had us really stumped… Everyone could log into the FTP site under port 21, but when a non standard port was used; the other router users could not get access at all…
We tried everything we could think of to see what we had missed, but did not resort to calling D-link's great technical support as we wanted to figure this out ourselves, but it would appear that this is something that routers in general seems to have problems with, not just the DSL-504 unit on it's own. According to the various web sites we checked out with users who had experienced similar problems using other manufacturers equipment this would seem to be a tricky issue that has a lot of people tearing their hair out like us!Pop over and read the on-going issues with people trying to use FTP sessions on ports other than 21 using the LinkSys routers.
For many companies this wont present too much of a problem as they tend to stick to using defined ports anyway, but for security reasons people do like the option of hiding their ports from people who may be scanning for known ports and sessions.
The only other problem we found was when we tried to disable the NAT function of the router, it just kept resetting back to ON no matter what we did.
FIRMWARE UPDATE
We finally decided to call D-Link Technical support and explained what we had experienced. We received a new firmware update via email in 5 minutes that upgraded the firmware from 1.13 to 1.14.
It's very easy to do the upgrade and you are guided through everything step by step, but you should be aware that all your settings will be erased and you will have to type them all back into the unit again.
Changes in this firmware update are that the ability to disable the NAT feature now works (if you feel the need to do so), and we now have a new screen that allows you to configure the router for Remote Management over WAN, very handy if you need to do some tweaking while out of the office!
More importantly, we tried to get users to log into a non standard port running under IIS (port 999) and this time we had success! Other BTOPENWORLD users could log straight into the system, but we still had some users on HOME CHOICE who had difficulty connecting. Considering they these users cannot host any FTP or WEB servers, this could be down to port blocking on their ISP's part.
INTERESTING POINT
BTOPENWORLD users have Dynamic IP for their connections unless they pay for static). During the testing of this router we have had it running solid, with many resets during configuration changes etc, and the IP we have been using has remained the same during the testing period. It will be interesting to see how long this will remain!
VERDICT
Overall we think this unit is superb and the technical support from the D-Link staff proved once again to be great in getting our questions answered and problems sorted.
The speed of the routers network connection is also very good, copying a 795MB image file in 2 Minutes 12 seconds, so if you have a 10/100 hub or a 10MB system, try copying that size of data over and see how long this takes on your own system.
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Epinions.com ID:
gkeenan
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Member: Gordon Keenan
Location: Glasgow - Scotland
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Dealing with technology on a daily basis, we just want help others out.
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