D-Link DIR-625 - Wireless is unstable, any sugestions?

Discussion in 'PC hardware help' started by truno, Sep 1, 2008.

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  1. truno

    truno Member

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    I'm going to look into it but I know if you have dd-wrt there is a way to steal bandwidth. I read about it a while ago that you can use the wireless as a client and log onto another wireless router and loadshare with that host. The idea is you can hop on your neighbors wifi and use some of his bandwidth to give you higher torrenting speeds than your isp allows. I never got it to work though.

    Also one more note about my wifi problems. as someone mentioned before the encryption enabled will create a lot of extra overhead on the wireless network so turning it off will give you faster speed. My solution was to not broadcast my ssid so my network will be "invisible" this way i can disable the encryption. I know the network is not actually invisible but i live in the projects and I highly doubt anyone around here is smart enough to figure out how to packet sniff and find out how to log into my network.
     
    truno, Sep 23, 2008
    #41
  2. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Encryption doesn't take up much overhead at all. Plus remember i'm using WDS ie bandwidth is halved for each WDS node. I get perfectly sufficient bandwidth and coverage even though i'm on WDS (plus the WDS is over WPA encryption too). And sometimes i hook up the 3rd WDS node and bandwidth is lowered again yet still perfectly fine.

    I've never got SSID hiding to work, plus i've read that hiding it is pointless anyways.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2008
    creaky, Sep 23, 2008
    #42
  3. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    SSID hiding worked fine for our box, but it proved problematic when we needed to get someone with an older wireless card onto the network - so we re-enabled it.
     
    sammorris, Sep 23, 2008
    #43
  4. truno

    truno Member

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    hiding ssid is problematic for some cards.

    your right it isn't a fortified way to protect your wireless but it is an extra precaution that is better than having it broadcast. like i said my packets are unencrypted so if someone were to capture them, all my info is wide open. In order to do that though you'd have to have a card that can run in bypass mode (not sure of the terminology) and as I stated earlier the level of tech sophistication around here is very very low. But then again they say never judge a book so I'll turn my wpa back on. I'll see if it makes a difference.

    I think I figured out the cause of all my woes. I noticed that the new router was still kicking me off. I go into the routers log and it turns out the wireless shut it self down and restarted itself back up. Now all i have to do is figure out why its shutting down and I think I will have solved my problems. I will give d links customer care a call when I get home but If anyone has a theory as to why my brand new dir 655 is shutting down the wireless please feel free to share.
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2008
    truno, Sep 23, 2008
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  5. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Good stuff. I'm no wireless expert by any means, but i can certainly vouch for olde worlde 802.11g technology and WPA being more than able to transmit thru Victorian walls (and asbestos LOL). There's very few people living around here but it only takes one to hack in :p

    My old D-Link router (not wireless admittedly) was stable but had an annoying habit of crashing once a week; never did get to the bottom of it and it's just used as a dumb ethernet switch now anyways.
    Maybe there's just a setting in your router that needs tweaking. I don't rate stock D-Link firmware anyway (mine would lose settings even after they'd been saved, very hit and miss. Hence why i no longer trust D-Link routers..

    edit- am just reading thru this - http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r17788293-Info-DLink-DIR655-hardware-versions

    If you read past all the "wish i hadn't bought Draft N" replies, it seems there's 2 hardware revisions of the 655. It's probably got nothing to do with your disconnections but you never know..
     
    Last edited: Sep 23, 2008
    creaky, Sep 23, 2008
    #45
  6. truno

    truno Member

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    Thanks to craigs list I sold my dir 625 for 50 bucks. So scrap that wireless repeater project. I did manage to get to the bottom of the random wireless shut down. I changed it to auto channel scan and it seems to be working good. My connection stays around 100 mbs but I am back to using the built in braodcom on my HP dv9000us. Its seems stable enough so yeah.


    I read through that forum and the first thing I did when I got my 655 was upgrade the firmware. I have an A2 so your right it doesn't apply to me, but a good read non the less. I never owned a d link router so I never new that they had such a bad rep. My first router in fact was a belkin. Now that was a POS. It use to shut it self off at least once a day. I'd have to go and manually restart it all the time. It was replaced by a netgear. Then I got my wrt54g and flashed it with dd-wrt (after I heard about it on Digg) and I was in router heaven.
     
    truno, Sep 24, 2008
    #46
  7. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Good stuff, glad to hear all is well.
    I had a few Belkin's, they were utterly atrocious landfill quality. I too moved to the WRT54G (v5) and suddenly i had a stable modem for months at a time. In my case the stock firmware worked perfectly, other than being crap with torrenting. At the time the latest stock firmware release solved that problem, the router was only decomissioned due to me moving to the Buffalo's, but recently i felt guilty about the WRT54G being confined to the spares cupboard so it got flashed with DD-WRT Micro and is now my 3rd WDS node (occasionally, but only as it's not needed often).
     
    creaky, Sep 24, 2008
    #47
  8. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Isn't the WRT54G just a router though, not a modem? Routers are fine, but the modems are VERY hard to get right, a friend is telling me to try a Netgear DG834G...
     
    sammorris, Sep 25, 2008
    #48
  9. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    Yeah, the WRT54G's hang off cable modems (can't remember if they work off ADSL modems though), however my Buffalo's work on both.

    I don't rate Netgear's very much, the couple routers i've used were pants.
     
    creaky, Sep 25, 2008
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  10. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Same, but they were older models...
     
    sammorris, Sep 25, 2008
    #50
  11. creaky

    creaky Moderator Staff Member

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    At home we're still using the ancient Motorola cable modem. it 'just works'. At g/f's place, it's ADSL, i've used a few different modem's there, BT Voyager's (wired and wireless), i recently replaced the Voyager wireless with a Buffalo with dd-wrt on, works much better than the Voyagers, whether wired or wireless. And on the river i used to use my trusty old D-Link 504-T, which was 100% stable other than hanging once a week almost to the hour. The 504-T is making up for the hanging behaviour by acting as a dumb switch these days :)
     
    creaky, Sep 25, 2008
    #51
  12. truno

    truno Member

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    People don't usually go around replacing modems. In fact you really can't just buy one and plug it in. Your ISP supplies you with one because their networks are built to use a specific one. What a modem does is it syncs the flow of traffic from your end to the ISP's end.
    It basically has whats called a clock rate configured into it and it uses that to sync transmissions. I might be wrong about this but your end is called a DTE and the ISP's end is called a DCE?

    I know that link sys and some other companies do make modems but I remember a while back I bought a modem off of my ISP so I wouldn't have to pay the modem rental fee, then I switched ISP's and they said I had to use their modem I couldn't use mine. Also Cable is a shared medium so the modem also makes sure that your ok to transmit and converts your data into a stream that can travel on coaxial. DSL is not a shared medium so all that modem does is convert your data into a stream that travels on the phone lines.

    I don't know If you see a service difference by using different modems
     
    truno, Sep 27, 2008
    #52
  13. sammorris

    sammorris Senior member

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    Tell you that they might have, but honestly, as long as your modem supports the ADSL standard you use, you can use any, that is my experience. A modem my ISP told me was incompatible with my service isn't, on two separate occasions...
     
    sammorris, Sep 28, 2008
    #53
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