[wireless DI-624] Where did firmware 2.36 go? - D-Link (2024)

jonazen to hqh510

Premium Member

2004-Feb-24 5:09 pm

D-Link *did* remove it, but I believe it's because they became alarmed by all the complaints that appeared so quickly after they put it on their site. I believe that it actually fixed more problems than it created -- at least that's been my personal experience.

I struggled with 2.28 for several days. NOTHING I did would let my wired and wireless LAN segments ping each other or see each other in any way (e.g., Win XP/home could NOT browse either pc from the other). I read dozens of website articles, tried dozens of workarounds -- none worked for me.

Also: working with 2.28, I found that my wireless connection seemed very unstable - I was getting real disconnects from the wireless end every 30 seconds to a minute it seemed (never clocked this, but it was very frequent). I had to disable Turbo mode altogether to get 2.28 working.

I had downloaded 2.36 before they deleted it from the FTP site and finally gave it a try. As you'll see in some of my other posts (if you search), I suspect that the log filling up from spurious reconnect messages may be a reason for the periodic router reboots others have seen, so I made a few changes to my environment:

- on the Status/Logging page, I unchecked "system activity" (that means the reconnects aren't logged)

- I turned off DHCP (although I'm not sure that's significant - will experiment later on)

As soon as I installed 2.36, I could ping all devices from all others (wireless and wired), and Win XP happily browses each machine's shared folders from the other machine.

I left it at this, with Turbo G still disabled, and didn't have a single disconnect for something like 9 hours. The entire network seemed to be running beautifully.

A little while ago, I got gutsy, and added the following:

- Turned on Dynamic Turbo G
- Set the router to G only
- Turned off CTS (I'm only using G devices, so we shouldn't have collisions of this type, and throughput should be faster according to D-Link docs)

I've been connected about 30 mins since then. No disconnects, very fast connection, wireless happily reports it's working at Turbo G / 108 mbps.

I believe that there are still a few odd bugs in 2.36, but with some judicious settings and experimentation, it seems to be more capable than 2.28, and it appears that it can be set up to be stable as well. But it's only been a relatively short time since I made the changes, so I'll have to watch it for a few days, and see if it remains stable.

Others may warn you away from 2.36 -- and they may be right. But in my experience, I seem to have been able to set up a 2.36 configuration that is far more functional for me than 2.28 could ever be. Only time will tell I suppose.

Re: downloading 2.36 -- somebody posted a message here a day or two ago with a link for a download (probably from a personal site?). If you search the forum, you should be able to find the link (or maybe somebody else here will read this thread and point you to the proper msg).

speedlever
join:2003-11-30
High Point, NC

speedlever

Member

2004-Feb-24 8:26 pm

jetspeed,

v2.36 works just fine on my 624/C1.

jonazen, for the record, I browsed my shares with v2.28 as well as 2.36.

So you're getting 108 Mbps connects with dynamic turbo? I should try that again as I only saw 54 Mbps connects. But that was also on an older fw version.

And that's a great idea to change the router log settings. If a full router log is 20 pages, I've seen that a lot and have not seen a reboot as a consequence.

jonazen

Premium Member

2004-Feb-24 8:51 pm

speedlever - curious that you were able to browse shares: this was across the wired/wireless divide?

About the only thing I didn't try was to add NetBEUI to my XP installations. This is the first Windows release that didn't include it, and it's the first version of Windows that doesn't default to using it for browsing. In reading some other threads (not this site) about finding workarounds for the wired/wireless browsing problems, I read more than once that a potential solution would be to install NetBEUI to the machines on the LAN.

MS has a page that discusses this. They warn that they do not officially support NetBEUI for XP, but they acknowledge that it works, and may be useful for those installations that aren't ready to stop using it altogether. Then they provide the link for downloading it to add to XP.

I BELIEVE (not sure), that if you installed XP as an upgrade to a Win/2K or Win/NT installation, NetBEUI will remain in your XP system from the prior version. A side-effect would be (again, I believe, but am not certain) that you could browse shares even if the TCP/IP-based browsing that XP defaults to is blocked.

Whew - that was a big mouthful!

Anyway - that's my long-winded prelude to asking you: are your XP machines fresh installs, or were they upgrades to earlier versions of Windows (which would have had NetBEUI on them)?

jonazen to speedlever

Premium Member

2004-Feb-24 8:54 pm

Oh - in ref to your question re Dynamic Turbo: yes, have had lovely 108 kbps connects w/Dynamic Turbo since I installed 2.36.

This config feels very good so far. Only about 5 hours old since I turned on Super G again, but everything is working very nicely, no errors accumulating anywhere, bandwidth is excellent all around, no disconnects, no reboots.

swank121
join:2004-02-24
Logan, UT

swank121 to jonazen

Member

2004-Feb-24 9:06 pm

Excuse the off-topic post, but I couldn't see my wired LAN across the DI-624/C2 from wireless clients either. No amount of changing settings on the router seemed to help, but after three hours (no kidding) of frustration and a strong desire to throw the router out the window, I set up my wireless clients' IP addresses manually (instead of using DHCP) .. Like magic everything started working. My guess is it has something to do with the DI-624 not forwarding DHCP discover requests properly from wireless to wired .. it just soaks them up like a sponge.

As an aside, I used to use the DI-624 as a router and my wireless clients could see my wired ones just fine. It wasn't until I started using it as an AP only that they stopped working.