Dir-615

Acathla · 13-09-2009, 11:06

Chaps, I am looking at gathering people's experience with this router. Was installed on Friday along with my new 50meg. Initial experience of the 50meg is fantastic, apart from I am suffering from a large amount of noise on the upload line but I am assured the tech's will get onto it to fix next week.

The router on the other hand is causing me so many problems. It looks stunning sitting on top of my modem but it's just slow and unreliable.

Throughput wise its good - I'm going through the router and a switch and I have no problem hitting 50meg mostly all the time - in fact the tech was even surprised how quick it went.

Problems start when you actually try and use the router! Config pages are soooo slow. Clicking from page to page can take several seconds (I'm talking up to 10 most of the time) which is just not good enough.

DHCP - this is flakey as heck. Works when router has just been rebooted but after a few hours it seems to refuse to issue addresses out again. Have some devices dynamic DHCP and some with static DHCP reservations but it doesn't seem to help. Amazingly the dynamic assignments and even a little more reliable than static assignments!

NAT Loopback - This router doesn't allow for NAT loopback. If you don't know what nat loopback is have a read here, Basically if you have port's forwarded through your router for any services in your LAN, then try to access them from your LAN, your connection will fail. Yeah I know you can edit your hosts file to prevent your connection failing on nat loopback but that doesn't help when your WAN port and LAN port are different.

I'm going to try and stick with the router over the next couple days and see if these teething issue fix themselves. I'm going to pen a note to VM and Dlink to see if they can fix them with a firmware upgrade.

So interested to hear your experiences. Maybe I've got a duff router?

Last question, anyone know a third party firmware (dd-wrt, tomato, etc..) that works with this router that could help resolve these problems?

Cheers for reading!

Quam256 · 13-09-2009, 11:14

What firewall and antivirus are you using ?.

Acathla · 13-09-2009, 11:18

Well issue's are present on several devices/setups:

Hard Wired
----------
Windows 7 Desktop - Eset AV - No Firewall (windows firewall disabled)
Ubuntu Server - No AV - No Firewall

Wireless
--------
Windows 7 Laptop - Eset AV - No Firewall (windows firewall disabled)
Windows Vista Laptop - Comodo AV - No Firewall (windows firewall disabled)
Blackberry Smartphone - No AV - No Firewall
Android Smartphone - No AV - No Firewall

So unlikely anything to do with AV/Firewall is having an influence on the router.

dogsiwoo · 13-09-2009, 11:19

My Config pages load fine, however the lack of NAT Loopback is a massive PITA for me too!

I also find the Signal range and speeds to be terrible compared to my old WRT54GL (on stock Linksys FW)

Acathla · 13-09-2009, 11:25

Quote:

Originally Posted by dogsiwoo

My Config pages load fine, however the lack of NAT Loopback is a massive PITA for me too!

I also find the Signal range and speeds to be terrible compared to my old WRT54GL (on stock Linksys FW)

Thanks dogsiwoo. Could be my router is duff and the slow responses could also be the reason for DHCP being flakey.

Might need to call CS and see about a replacement.

BloodyL · 14-09-2009, 23:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by dogsiwoo

My Config pages load fine, however the lack of NAT Loopback is a massive PITA for me too!

I also find the Signal range and speeds to be terrible compared to my old WRT54GL (on stock Linksys FW)

I'll be upgrading on Thursday, I'm curious how the wrt54gl will work with 50mb as I'm currently running two of them, one with Tomato and the other with DD-WRT.
Cheers!

Ignitionnet · 15-09-2009, 10:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by BloodyL

I'll be upgrading on Thursday, I'm curious how the wrt54gl will work with 50mb as I'm currently running two of them, one with Tomato and the other with DD-WRT.
Cheers!

Not very well is the simple answer. Doesn't have the horsepower.

dogsiwoo · 15-09-2009, 11:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

Not very well is the simple answer. Doesn't have the horsepower.

Agreed - chip specs:

WRT54GL
Broadcomm 200MHz, 16MB RAM

DIR-615
Atheros 400MHz, 32MB RAM

My only major beef is the lack of NAT Loopback - the lower signal range/speed is not so bad for me

BloodyL · 15-09-2009, 13:48

Fair enough, 'tis also a bit of a pain that the LAN is not gigabit,
The second wrt I have is just for light wireless AP duties for the xbox360, so I'll probably just reset the second one back to default and flog it and use the main one with the 7dbi antennas as the WAP.
Thanks.

Acathla · 16-09-2009, 12:36

Randomly out of he blue this morning I received a Netgear WNR2000 Router from VM. Was not asked for nor expected but I'm going to connect it up to see if it performs better than the D-Link.

If someone sent me this after reading my post, all I can say is thank you very much, I hope it fixes my problems!

gauros · 16-09-2009, 13:23

They just installed me my 50meg and Dir-615 router and it has been terrible so far. On my brand new laptop windows live and slingplayer doesnt work whereas on my towers both of them work OK so far.

I will be waiting a few days and if nothing happens i will contact VM but not impressed by the router so far

Acathla · 16-09-2009, 13:33

Well first play with the Netgear:

Responds much faster than the d-link (although I do think my d-link was faulty).

Still no NAT Loopback! - Was I spoiled using Linksys all this time? Is NAT Loopback really that hard to implement??

DHCP is muuuuuuuuuuch better. Although I have to ensure my DHCP range incorporates the addresses in my static reservations, which is a bit odd. (ie I have a static reservation of .100 but set my DHCP range from .160 to .180, my static reservation will be ignored. I need to change the DHCP range from .100 to make sure it's assigned).

There was a new firmware upgrade straight out the box but I'm not sure it's changed anything major.

Oh well, sticking with it, so far better than the d-link - now to test performance of my 50meg through it!

EDIT:

Oh yeah and I can't forward a WAN port to a different LAN port. ie port 3001 open on WAN wanting to forward to port 80 on LAN. At least the d-link allowed for this

I want a combination of both.
I am never happy!

BloodyL · 17-09-2009, 17:23

Well, I ended up with a netgear router and d-link dongle, so far everything seems ok.
The config pages on the router takes a few seconds to load up though, it's taking a while to get used to the new setup compared to the old ntl:200 and wrt54gl.

Buffalo12 · 18-11-2009, 19:29

I have real problems at the moment with my DR-615. It is steadfastly refusing to issue IP addresses and I have had to configure most of my devices to run as fixed IP addresses. However, I need to be able to get them recognised by the DR-615 before I can access them to set a fixed IP address.

The major issue I have now is that a X-Box is attempting to connect to x-box live and killing the network.

Any suggestions.....