Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[harpocrates23]

Well for 89 bucks, thats not too bad. I would probably feel pretty frustrated by the features not working well and the noise this thing seems to cause if I paid full price. Oy vay man. Ya I agree seems like this router should be fully capable of doing most things, and shouldn't be noisy. Well, keep us posted. Hope something good comes about for ya.

the 89 bucks is the only reason i am not banging my head...A linksys/Cisco which does all that without the lcd it would be 150 and I would have rather paid that since i know cisco would work and not be noisy. Most linksys models also have dd-wrt firmware available unlocking them to a lot more functionality..

I even tried setting the static arp without telnet, just standard command prompt but it will only allow me to query the router..not set any values. My final idea is to connect the Dlink router to an old linksys I have..forward the port for udp to the routers ip which will always be on..when that router receives the magic packet that one can forward to ip .255 (ie all pcs connected to the secondary router). Its all I can think of and ill test that tomorrow I hope.

[FurryNutz]

Keep us posted.
One thing you might try, give Mother Fo a PM and see if he's still around. Let me know if you don't get a rise out of him I still have is email address. Maybe you can offer you some an assist as he was the one who wrote up the WOL for the 4500.

Honestly think there there are just some of these routers that for reason that we'll probably never know, just are not programmed to do a lot of high level or mid level networking. These router are fairly basic in design and really meant for general internet, gaming and streaming for the most part. Having these routers do other things beyond there scope is tough. I am glad there are alternative, WRT and Tomato out there to offer up more features for those who want or need mid or high level networking abilities.

[harpocrates23]

you would think something that is generally sold for 300 bucks would be considered high end and could do more than what your basic router does...

I tried a different technique now to see if it makes any difference. I moved the comcast modem and dlink router into living room so I could have a wired connection to pretty much everything in the house ...xbox, PS3, logitech revue and a network cable going upsatirs connected to the secondary router so the wake on lan pc would be connected to that router which forwards to ip .255. Still nothing yet. Have to keep playing around.

However now that everything is wired on the dir-685, my PS3 will finally see the router as a media center. Unfortunately some of the files wont play. The xbox that could always see the router, still does but it still has this random effect where sometimes it will see the video files, and other times it will not. When it does see the video files it wont play them, even though it can play the same files when it sees them through another PC on the network...so its not the file format...its how its shared through the router. The music files on the router will play on all systems..xbox, PS3 and logitech revue. The fan however will not stop running even when the hard drive isnt being accessed so I have decided to pull out the hard drive. I'm afraid the damn thing will melt while I'm gone.

I honestly think I should just sell this on craigslist or ebay and be over with it.

[FurryNutz]

Understand the frustration. For 300 buck you would think it would be classed as a high end router, however if you think about it, it's supposed to be a media router. Thus I can only presume that some features were sacrificed for others when designing this one. I can only speculate here.

Is interesting that the the media files are not being played properly after being wired up.
I presume your using reserved IP addresses on the router for the consoles?
And you have Multicast Streams enabled?

I agree with you, might be best in finding something else if you can off load this on. Sorry this has been a pain. Wish there was a good solution. 

[ggab]

Hi people,

Here is what I finally did to workaround the two main problems of this product :

=========
The noise
=========
Your internal hard disk heats up so the internal fan starts up and makes some unbearable noise.
The Workaround is to replace your standard hard disk with a solid state disk (SSD). A SSD disk consumes just about 1 watt and then the internal fan never starts up. I did it, it's perfect, but okay it's much more expansive than a standard HD and you get less GBytes. The good news is that your wife will not divorce cause of the dir685 and you can keep on access your FTP from outside  .

===============
The wake-on-lan
===============
You need to set a static entry in the DIR685's ARP-table. But there is a problem that makes an ARP static entry not completly satisfactory : this entry is not saved and just stands in the volatile memory. So if you reboot the Dir685, the static entry is no longer present...
So you need to find a way to periodically rewrite the static entry. As my PC automatically wakes up each night for backups, I can also launch a task that rewrites this static entry with telnet.

But sorry man, there is another problem : You can only "telnet" your DIR685 while about 30s - 1min just after it has rebooted, after that delay, the telnet server's process is no longer available !
So in order to peridically telnet your dir685, you need to reboot it first. But how to reboot it automatically through a browser ??
For that, I bought a macro software http://www.macro-expert.com/index.html (sorry for the advertisement, they don't pay me for that...) that makes it possible to launch your browser, type password, access the right config-page and reboot it.

Is it okay ? No man, there are still problems here : Dir685 has no arp command that can statically set the entry. That's the big part of the trick. Now take a good breathe in.
Dir685 has no external console port. But it has 4 internal pins to access the internal linux system. So I bought a USB-RS232 converter and a RS232-TTL converter. NEVER try to directly connect a PC serial port to the DIR685's internal 4 pins cause voltages are not the same and you'll destroy your box. Once you connected your PC to your DIR685 with your USB - serialPort - TTL - 4pins chain, you can access the internal system with a terminal such as PUTTY. For more details on how to plug lines on the 4pins and how to set the terminal (number of bit, parity, transmission speed...), search for fun_plug, busybox and dir685 in google...
Now you can access the dir685 linux system, you have to copy in the SSD disk a busybox pakage binary file (for ARM processor) that contains the arp command, make a little script to be run from your telnet command and all should be okay. Again search on google for more details.
Keep also in mind that you may break your warranty doing all of that and of course bad consequences are your responsability (but not risky is not funny  )...

So now, are you finally okay ? hem sorry... nobody told me the login/password to telnet my dir685. Well it exists though, i can confirm that. Even if your telnet is done inside your network, I dont really want to write here the login + password because of security concerns. Search with google, you will find it. Maybe it has also been given here in previous posts...

That's all folk !

[FurryNutz]

Good info GGAB, thanks for sharing. Hope this helps others.
I think between the SSDs and external drive wiring for HDDs should be good solutions to resolving the noise and heat issues.