The following is my story on how I overcame all the various troubles I have had with my new DIR-827 (Hardware Version: A1, Firmware Version: 1.01) media router in hopes that it will benefit others by sparing them time, effort, and frustration. Currently my DIR-827 is stable and I have been able to avoid returning the router. All the features that I bought the router for have been enabled and are presently working.
Problems: Slow or Non-Responsive, Dropping LAN connections, Does not Warm Boot/Reset, Sporadic RebootsI experienced all of the above problems with my router right out-of-the-box. After reading the manual, forums, and researching on the Internet as well as going through all sorts of process-of-limitation checking; I have some hindsight to share with you. I am not sure why all of the following things stabilized my router but they did.
Step 1: Factory Reset the Router and Ignore/Cancel out of the Wizard SetupsAfter following the forum's suggestions of disabling all feature sets, hard coding the DNS settings, and using different web browsers; my troubles still persisted. The troubles manifested themselves in router lockups after 15 to 90 minutes of use, slow admin router page responses, and the absence of the count down timer after clicking on the
Reboot Now button.
After I reset the router to factory defaults and canceled out of the initial setup wizards, I was able to log into the router with admin web page responses at 1-2 secs or less not the 3-90 seconds I had before. Also, after making a configuration change and clicking the
Reboot Now button, I finally got something I had never seen before. It was a rebooting web page with a count down timer asking you to please wait 60 seconds. And yes, the router rebooted and came back online whereas before the factory reset I had to power cycle the unit to reboot it using power button or unplugging the power adapter.
Step 2: Manually Configure Router and Disable Feature SetsThis part comes mostly from the forum's suggestions I read. Why turn off all the feature sets you bought the router for? At this point, I was willing to do it just to confirm if I was having a hardware problem or a software problem. Hardware problem meant a RMA which I wanted to avoid especially if my troubles had nothing to with the hardware but improper software configurations. So, I logged into the router. Then I configured it for my ISP and performed all the following settings. You, of course, will need to tailor your Internet Connection Setup to your particular environment and ISP.
SETUP-->INTERNET-->Manual Internet Connection Setup:
THIS IS FOR DSL PPPoE Setups. For Cable or other ISP, use DHCP. My Internet Connection is: PPPoE (Username /Password)
Username:
[email protected] Password: xxx
Verify Password: xxx
Reconnect Mode:
ALWAYS ON Maximum Idle Time: 30 (default was 5 minutes)
Primary DNS Server: aaa.bbb.ccc.dd1 (my ISP DNS servers do not change)
Secondary DNS Server: aaa.bbb.ccc.dd2
MTU: 1492 (verified by using the ping -f -l command from page 113 of user's manual ver 1.0)
MAC Address: (left it to the router's original mac/bia)
SETUP-->WIRELESS SETTINGS-->Manual Wireless Network Setup
This section can be rather complex so I am not going to go through all the settings but please note to make sure you create unique SSIDs for each Wireless Network you create. Others have indicated that having duplicate/overlapping SSIDs causes problems which is what I want to avoid. Apparently most WiFi devices can only connect to either the 2.4GHz or 5GHz radio bands at any given time so you need unique names for each SSID to join into the correct wireless zone. Also note, that when I ran through one of the WiFi wizards before the factory reset, it actually assigned the same SSID to both 2.4 and 5 GHz bands—which is not desirable.
SETUP-->NETWORK SETTINGS-->
ROUTER SETTINGS: Left the defaults and made sure the Enable DNS Relay option was checked.
DHCP SERVER SETTINGS: Left the defaults except for the following: enabled NetBIOS announcement and selected the Broadcast only option for the NetBIOS node type.
ADD DHCP RESERVATION--> This is something that the manual and forum suggested to do so I made DHCP reservations for each of my LAN computers.
It's recommended to always reserve IP addresses for devices ON the router so that each device gets it's own IP address everytime it connects and avoid conflicts. Helps in troubleshooting as well. ADVANCED-->QOS ENGINE-->
WAN TRAFFIC SHAPING: Uncheck the Enable Traffic Shaping option. This disables all other options in the QoS section.
Only need to disable if your troubleshooting or if your on a ISP uplink faster than 2Mb.ADVANCED-->FIREWALL SETTINGS-->
ENABLE SPI: Make sure the Enable SPI option is checked.
ANTI-SPOOF CHECKING: You can enable the selection if it is not by checking the Enable anti-spoof checking box.
DMZ HOST: Leave disabled
ALG: All 4 checked is fine.
ADVANCED-->ADVANCED WIRELESS
For each Wireless Band used, uncheck the Short GI options. This provides better compatibility with WiFi adapters.
ADVANCED-->WISH-->
WISH: Uncheck the Enable WISH option box.
ADVANCED-->ADVANCED NETWORK-->
UPNP: Uncheck the Enable UPnP option if you do not use UPnP applications in your network.
Leave it Enabled for general use. MULTICAST STREAMS: Check the Enable Multicast Streams option box.
Can be unchecked for troubleshooting or if your having problems with certain device connections. ADVANCED-->GUEST ZONE-->
Use if you need guest access to the Internet only.
TOOLS-->ADMIN-->
ADMIN PASSWORD: Please change the password from the default.
TOOLS-->TIME: I manually set the time and other time settings for the router. U
se the NTP server option as well to automatically maintain the time.NOTE: The router's web page has a 60 second idle timeout so as you configure your router please save the changes often. You do not have to reboot every time you make a change just click on the reboot later button when you are ready.Step 4: Test and Confirm the Router's StabilityRun with the majority of the feature sets that the router has to offer off and see if your router lives and breathes for a couple of days of use. If it appears to be stable, backup the router's configuration and continue to Step 5 where we will turn on various feature sets.
Step 5: Enabling Various Feature SetsI am only going to tell you briefly my lessons learned from some of the features. I plan on making other posts to detail out some of the other individual features. As I write this, there are other posts that dive into various features at various levels of detail.
ADVANCED-->QOS ENGINE-->
WAN TRAFFC SHAPING: If you enable traffic shaping make sure you also enable the QoS Engine as well.
QOS ENGINE:
The QoS Engine should be enabled with Automatic Classification together with Traffic Shaping.
Dynamic Fragmentation should
NOT be enabled due to several reasons. One of which is fragmented packets are now used for denial-of-service attacks. Also, they can be used in circumventing firewalls and intrusion detection/prevention systems allowing malicious code to be sent through. Fragmentation also places an ever increasing burden on network elements and applications to fragment, resemble, and buffer these packets as well as increased overhead for retransmission of lost/dropped packets. Furthermore, more and more techniques are being utilized on the Internet to secure communications from client to server. So, having the router tamper with the packet by fragmenting it up into various pieces could break these types of secured communications without a application level gateway (ALG) being developed such as the PPTP and IPSec (VPN) ones the DIR-827 has. In short, it is not worth enabling the dynamic fragmentation option because it is out-of-date and can silently and adversely impact communications.
ADVANCED-->WISH-->
WISH: If you enable this feature please remember to tell it something to do either by enabling priority classifier(s) and/or providing your own wish rules.
ADVANCED-->ADVANCED NETWORK-->
UPNP: I enabled this function and together with my Win7 applications and all worked just fine. Successful evidence of it working shows up in STATUS-->INTERNET SESSIONS as Internet 239.255.255.250 with protocol of IGMP. These entries are not always in the sessions table but are there when UPnP traffic is occurring.
MULTICAST STREAMS: I enabled this option so that I could receive multicast streams from the Internet. It is evidenced by 224.0.0.252 with protocol of IGMP when you look at INTERNET SESSIONS.
TOOLS-->TIME-->AUTOMATIC TIME CONFIGURATION: I enabled this feature. It works very well.
STATUS-->DEVICE INFO-->
WIRELESS LAN & LAN2: At one point during my hassles before resetting the router to its factory default, the wireless radios were set to OFF. I mean OFF and not disabled. Not sure what I did to make that happen but it did. After I went in and reconfigured the WiFi settings, it all worked including the radios.
Hope it helps,
AquaManiac
Author
Topic: DIR-827 Router Trouble Out-of-the-Box (Read 47950 times)