Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Configuring a D-Link DI624+

Tonight I set up a wireless access point. It took about 1/2 an hour with Rohan's assistance on the phone. There were a couple of fiddly little things that maybe useful information.
The unit was a D-Link DI-624+ Wireless Router. This has a WAN port, 4 LAN ports and wireless 802.11G protocol.

I have a HP nx6120 laptop that I used to configure and test this with as it has a wireless adapter built in.

The main difficulty I had was changing the IP address and this was due to the fact that I already have DHCP running on my network, in my Linux server. To do this I had to connect via a cable to the laptop directly. I then connected a browser to 192.168.0.1 which opens the admin page. The user name is admin and there is no password in the factory default. I of course changed this. Then I turned on the wireless network, set WAN to dynamic as I was not using the WAN fucntion, disabled DHCP and then set the LAN to the IP address I wanted on my network..
I rebooted the router at each change application and when finished I needed to reboot the laptop. Why? If you have a Centrino chip in a laptop with wireless, then if you want to change the wireless settings on a wireless router or access point then you will need to reboot the laptop to rediscover the network. Once I booted up lo and behold I discovered a network. It was unsecure. So I did it all again and in the wirelss settings page I set the network to WEP, 128 bit encryption with an ASCII 13 digit access code.
This is pretty secure!
To make it even more secure, after I located it in the center of my house (connected to my network by cable) I turned it off. Of course that means it won't work, but I only need it if I want to work in the media room while watching sport on telly, or for when I buy a D-Link DSM-320 media streamer...

The router works fast - blisteringly so. I downloaded the 5Mb manual for the thing at 120kbps. The setup is easy to understand and intuituve, with the really advanced stuff hidden on separate pages. There was a wizard which didn't work for me, but would probably work pretty well for someone setting this up as their main internet router and LAN switch.

All in all probably one of the easiest to set up routers I have come across.


Posted by: Jethro | 12:07 AM |