D-Link Horror Story

Having not-so-recently realized that my Linksys BEFSR41 was slowly dying, I decided to scope out another 4-port router made by someone else. I eventually decided on the D-Link DI-604. Just got it today, and as soon as I get an RMA number it’s going back for a refund.

Would you like to know why? I’ll tell you.

I set it up this morning. It worked right out of the box! All I had to do was transfer over all of my forwarding settings from the old router. So, I decided to disable the DHCP server on it and give it a different IP address in the same subnet as the D-Link router. This worked, for awhile.

For some strange reason, after about 45 minutes, the new router seemed to reset itself. Then, once my connection reestablished, I noticed I got a WAN (Internet) IP address assigned to my computer. WTF? I tried several things, one of which was unplugging the cable modem. The router’s internal IP address DHCP refused to function. I couldn’t access its configuration page.

I tried doing a hardware reset, but that didn’t help. Eventually, I gave my computer a static IP address. That seemed to work, but I still couldn’t access the WAN. Furthermore, attempting to access the router’s configuration page presented me with a plain “Firmware Upgrade” page, with a box to choose a firmware file from my computer to upload to the router, and a Send button.

OK, I figure, might as well try it. I head to D-Link’s site and download the latest firmware (by this time I had my Linksys hooked back up to the cable modem), along with the previous version, since that’s what the thing originally had on it. It sends the firmware to the router. The router refreshes and reboots, coming back to the exact same firmware update page. Over the course of the couple of hours working with this router, I tried 4 different firmware revisions, nothing seeming to fix the problem. I attempted doing a hardware reset dozens of times, but the thing never flashed its lights at me like it did after it rebooted itself after running the wizard when I first got it running. I searched the Intarweb looking for solutions. All the configuration pages on it that I had previously accessed while it worked were now 404. It’s as if it had been “reformatted”, if you will.

After a couple of hours, I was pretty tired of this, so I headed to the place I bought it and sent in an RMA request. Hopefully, I’ll get the RMA number tomorrow.