Router Issues & Bugs Blog

Hi All;

It appears that people are posting direct links to firmware on this sites dropbox account. Please spare a thought to this site when doing this as you are robbing this site of much needed traffic.

There are posts on DLinks and other forums linking directly to the dlinkedrouter firmwares. The only way to get attention to the firmware issues and make DLink get off their behinds and do something, is by being heard and in this site’s case, traffic. Directly linking to firmware means that I get no traffic. This is a standard WordPress blog hosted by WordPress and so I make no money off this, I do this purely to fight for the DLink consumers against DLink’s bad quality.

Please think twice before linking directly, or if you must, then please think about attributing the link with the sites URL.

Thanks in advance.

DlinkedRouter

I recently helped a person who had a new DIR-655 and really wasn’t an IT person and therefore only had a working knowledge of Networking.

He was having troubles getting his 655 to connect via PPPoE and it turns out he had made an assumption about how routers work that wasn’t true but was an easy enough assumption to make if you didn’t exactly understand how routers work with PPPoE.

What really irks me about that situation was that DLink demanded money to support him. There is something fundamentally wrong with how DLink support customers here. They sell a highly technical device to the average home user who is typically non-technical. Therefore it is completely expected that some users will struggle setting them up.

DLink unreasonably expect that the lame manuals will be enough for any average person to follow and that if it isn’t, they will demand money from them to explain it to them so that it will be configured properly. They are making money off customers buying their products and again explaining to customers how to use their products.

I think that just stinks of greed. Some users just don’t get IT naturally and need to be coached. Their products are aimed for the home, THEY WILL GET NON IT PEOPLE BUYING THEIR PRODUCTS and so they should offer their support free of charge.

Basically, if you are an average home user, DON’T BUY DLINK as routers do need some level IT skills to configure and if you do not have them, DLink will demand money from you to help you with their routers.

Best off looking for a company that is prepared to support IT illiterate consumers free of charge. If you are aware of one, post a comment.

I recently posted the comment below in response to a DIR-855 owner who was returning their router.

Move off DLink, their quality is no better than the no name routers that come out of China but charge as if they are high end routers. Further more, they are not committed to fixing the issues.

I’d really like to know how many people actually agree with that statement to determine if it is a common sentiment among DLink owners. Hence, the poll below:

Just a reminder of some helpful tips I have posted previously:

• Latest firmware now supports http://router.dlink.com which is equivalent http://192.168.0.1
• You can get details of your firmware on your router by going to http://192.168.0.1/chklst.txt
• The newest firmware now support the DLink gadget on the windows 7/vista gadget gallery

Please attribute my posts when posting elsewhere. I have noticed people taking credit for my work on the DLink forums.

UPDATE: I have included an extra field for those that feel their router IS STABLE now.

It has been a little over a year since DLink screwed their customers with a spade of poorly tested and unstable firmware with no way to go back to the previous version. This then followed with half arsed attempts to fix serious issues with subsequent firmware releases.

I have been getting mixed results from DLink Router owners regarding stability with the latest series of firmwares.

Some have emailed me in the last few months saying that their router issues have been resolved while others say they have developed issues with the latest series of firmware for the Ubicomm platform (DIR655,825RevA, 855, 628 and DGL4500).

I am conducting this pole to determine what the majority are experiencing as most do not take the time to send emails to me.

If you own an N series DLink router, then pelase vote. At this stage I am not too worried about the model unless you own an 825.RevB or 665 as these are based off a different platform.

I have created pages to summarizes firmware change logs under the firmware menu.

Currently I have change logs for the DIR-628, DIR-655 and DIR-855. I will see if I can find details for the DGL-4500.

Hi all, I own a QNAP 239 Pro file server and what a superb device it is.

I have owned two Buffalo NAS’s in the past and the QNAP beats the competition hands down in my books. Lots of features, great performance and well maintained firmware.

Enough of the hard sell and onto why I am blogging about QNAP. In the years that I have had to call “Tech Support”, I have never really been impressed with the level of knowledge the person on the end of the phone actually had, especially when you are diverted to an overseas call center. In most cases, the support people refer back to a knowledge base which they read out to you verbatim. DLink definitely falls into this boat. I figure, if they actually where technically apt, they would not be working as a help desk person as their aspersions would not settle for it.

Recently, my NAS suffered from a failed HDD and since it was in a RAID 1 configuration, it should have recovered into single drive mode but failed to do so after I rebooted. I went through the motions of contacting QNAP (more on that later) and got through to a person with the alias QNAP_FAN.

Now, he didn’t read out some procedure verbatim for me to follow, he logged into the NAS via a remote session and began to navigate through it to find the cause. He clearly had a sound knowledge of Linux, the firmware and how to recover data. He had noticed that there was a clear issue with the firmware as it was report version 3.3.1 Build 0000 and contacted a firmware developer in QNAP. Within 10 minutes, I had one of a firmware developer debuging the issue and taking copies of syslogs.

In the end, the issue was resolved and I am expecting a firmware update soon to ensure that this will not happen to me or anyone else.

Ladies and gentleman, this is how support should be, dealing with people who know the product inside and out and have advanced technical knowledge. They shouldn’t be reading out instructions which end up taking 20 minutes to complete when they can do it in 2 minutes. Even more so, when an issue is identified, developers get involved with the customers and are proactive in fixing the issue.

DLink, I hope you get bought out by these people and they dump your useless support practices.

Just so I am not just painting a perfect picture here, their is definitely room for improvement at QNAP. Firstly, they advertise a contact phone number in Taiwan and when you dial it (I used a calling card and cost very little), you get a menu for language, select English and then you get a message in Chinese followed by the phone hanging up. I think the Chinese message was, “Sorry but all our lines are busy, please try again later, thank you”, but I cannot be certain. I then tried the Skype contact number many times but never connected.

In the end, I went with the email process and it worked. I got a response within a few hours and once I set up the Application Sharing, it wasn’t long before QNAP_FAN was on the job.

Also the process of having to wait for QNAP_FAN to connect was inefficient as I had to follow up with a phone call (and this time I connected) at which point he connected straight away.

I do not see an issue with having to speak to people in Taiwan considering the level of excellence these support people have. I know that this is frowned upon by most western people when contacting support, but these guys are worth it and I cannot say that if there was a local office with support, that it would be as good.

I hope QNAP keep their support people happy as they are a credit to their company and it is people like them who make the QNAP product successful.

On march 16th of this year, Dlinkedrouter had reached 10,000 hits and now 3 months on , the site has 20,000 hits. What is really great is that the visits per day is growing at a healthy rate.

Please reference this site when posting on other forums so as to get more traffic because at some point DLink are going to have to notice and start addressing the issues.

DLink anounced the release of the DIR-665 Xtreme N 450 Gigabit Router and quite laughably it is Connect with Intel Centrino Ultimate-N and Wi-Fi certificatied.

Well ladies and gentleman, the previous range was suppose to be certified by all kinds of wireless authorities and you only need to go to the DLink forums to see what a load of rectal dribble those certifications account for with all the wireless issues their products have.

Their products have some really great marketing spin, but never really deliver on stability. President OBama could certify their products, doesn’t make them any better!

I challenge DLink to get their products right and stable….. But we all know you cannot live upto that challenge or else you would have done it by now.

This is apparently a very old chest nut but my experience with it last night is making me bring it up all over again.

DLink still haven’t addressed all the issues with Wireless connections causing reboots as I still have to contend with my router rebooting when I run a VPN session via wireless.

Nothing more frustrating than running a global meeting in the middle of the night and having to re-establish a VPN connection and get the uses to reconnect into your App Share session.

When people by a wireless router, they expect it to work, period. We do not expect caveats like “except when you run a VPN session through it”.