DI-624

The DI-624 will function as the centerpiece of your wireless and wired network. At a basic level, it is a home router and an Access Point (AP) combined into one device. It houses both the wireless components and a 4-port switch for regular wired Ethernet access, and is housed in the typical D-Link grey/blue plastic covering. As you can see below, the package comes with not only the router but also an AC adapter, manual, CD, a CAT-5 cable, feet for standing the router sideways, wall-mounting hardware and "feet" so that this router can be made part of a D-Link stack. The CD contains nothing more than a Manual and an Install Guide, so it's not needed. It was nice to see the inclusion of a CAT-5 cable, considering that you'll need it to use the router.

At first appearance, the router is fairly small, or maybe about average for a home router's size nowadays. It's maybe close to three times the size of a pack of cards, and is quite light weight. As always, I would've preferred a metal housing, but hardly any home network devices are built like that, so I cannot hold this against D-Link. Another thing to note is that this is the latest version of the DI-624, marked as Revision C, and has only one antenna, and also sports some changes under the hood such as a faster processor. It also features Xbox Live compatibility.

The DI-624.

Size comparison.

Accessories.

Since you'll probably have some wired clients, a 4-port switch is built into the DI-624, as is the case with many home routers. The ports feature MDI/MDIX Auto Cross so that you won't need to worry about the type of cable you're using to connect an endstation or other network device to the DI-624; with this feature, the ports will automatically adjust for whatever cable or device is being connected, a very handy feature for the quick set up of a network. You'll also note that the antenna is removeable, either for transportation or should you want to install another one. The WAN port is also at the back, and is fully 10/100Mbps capable; this is where you'll plug your DSL or cable modem into.

The included feet can be made to stand up the router in a sideways position, which is good for if you don't have a lot of horizontal space. Furthermore, the included mounting hardware can either securely attach the router to a surface or a wall.

The front features many status LEDs: Power, Status, WAN, WLAN, and one for each of the ports in the switch. Most are self explanatory - the WAN, WLAN and port lights blink during data transfer; however the Status LED blinks to indicate that router is okay. To me, this behaviour is counter-intuitive; when something is blinking, it usually attracts attentions and thus should indicate that something is wrong rather than indicating everything is okay.

Back.

Bottom has mounts for wall attachment.

Can be stood up sideways.

Front.

The quick install guide uses screenshots to clearly show you how to get the router up and running, and set up your computers with it. It's very well-written and even if you're new to the whole networking thing, you shouldn't have any trouble following it, and furthermore, the web-based interface used to configure the DI-624 is very easy to use as well, and includes its own useful Help section.

Installation

To setup the router, you'll probably want to use a wired connection at first, since you may want to change the default wireless settings and not lose connectivity as a result. The computer you're working at should be set to use DHCP to get an IP address; D-Link's manual shows you how to do this. After that, you should point your web browser to the default IP of the router, which is 192.168.0.1, a pretty common IP for home routers.

The "Wizard" allows you to setup the router in an easy step-by-step fashion. It prompts you to change basic things like the password, SSID, set your ISP's login information, and clone your PC's MAC addy, which may be necessary for some ISPs. However, if you want to configure advanced functionality, this has obviously been left out for brevity. It does get the job done of getting the router up and running, though. By default, the router is set to also be a DHCP server, assigning IPs from the range of .100 to .199 of whatever subnet it's on. (It doesn't assign IPs lower than 100, since some other D-Link products are set up to use a static IP from this range.)

For more options, you have to dig into the configuration pages. The wireless settings allow you to set the SSID, channel, and authentication/encryption options. Note that the screenshot below was taken with firmware v2.42; when I updated to the beta 2.45 firmware, the Super G/Turbo options were moved to here, where they are better suited to be. I'd recommend using some form of WPA over the other authentication options plus WEP. Since you're not likely to have a RADIUS server setup at home to be able to use the 802.1x features of full WPA, you'll likely want to use WPA-PSK, which uses a shared password (that you must provide to the router and each client) as the authentication method, but after that uses TKIP for generating the keys for encryption, which is much more secure than the static keys used with WEP.

If however, you must use WEP since not all of your clients support WPA, use Open Authentication rather than Shared Key, since the latter greatly increases the risk of your WEP keys being discovered. WPA is good, but all of this mess will hopefully be sorted out when 802.11i is finalized - but this will probably require new hardware. (WPA is an interim standard by the Wi-fi Alliance, brought into being since 802.11i couldn't arrive fast enough to take over the duty of WEP.)

Wireless options.

WAN/ISP settings.

DHCP settings.

Virtual Server Settings.

The WAN or ISP section has options for almost any broadband ISP out there. Cable, DSL, and PPPoE for some DSL users are all supported, and you shouldn't have trouble connecting to your ISP. You can even have the DI-624 "clone" a MAC address of one of your computers, in case your ISP checks for that. The DHCP section allows you configure or enable/disable DHCP. You can also setup "Static DHCP", which seems like an oxymoron, but basically it works by creating a list of IPs to MAC addresses; from this table, you can make sure that a certain computer always receives the same IP address from the DHCP server. This can be useful if you need to forward a certain port to a computer based on its IP address; with static DHCP you won't need to set up the computer with a static IP as you can do that within the router's interface. I found this feature pretty useful.

The Virtual Server page is where you can do that port forwarding. For example, if you are running an FTP server on one of your computers you'll need to set that up here. You can set the public/private port as well as the protocol (TCP/UDP or both) and you can also set a schedule based on the time of day and day of week, for the rule to be active.

Special Applications.

Filters page.

Firewall rules.

Wireless Performance page.

The Special Applications page is somewhat similar to the Virtual Server page, in that this time you are opening/forwarding ports based on a trigger, and usually to a client application. This feature was implemented in order to open ports based on certain applications being used. For example, without the use of passive mode, when you connect to an FTP server, you usually connect to port 21 of that server; however, the server must also connect to a port on your computer to send data; I believe this port is known as ftp-data and is usually port 20. The router normally blocks all inbound connections, so as a result you wouldn't be able to properly use the FTP server.

The Special Applications page allows you fix that. You set up a trigger port or port range, the protocol type, and the public port/port range that needs to have inbound access set up for. In our example, the trigger would be port 21, and the public port would be ftp-data, which is 20, I believe. This works for all clients on your private LAN, and can be used for a variety of programs, such as file-sharing applications or the like.

The filters page can be used to deny access to the Internet based on IP address. It's not too useful if you do it on a per-IP address basis, since a user might be able to change their IP address with ease. However, you can block all IP addresses from connecting to certain ports, say, if you don't want them using FTP servers that run on port 21.

You can also set up MAC filters; this is a bit more useful. Here, you can create either an allowed or a blocked list of MAC addresses; clients with a MAC addy in the list will either be allowed or blocked. Thus, if you have a limited list of wireless clients, you can set this up to only allow them to connect. However, this can be circumvented since it's possible to change how your MAC address looks to the rest of the world.

The firewall settings page can be used to setup more broad-based rules than the other pages. The settings here are bit more fundamental, so you have to know what you're doing. As with other pages, you can specify the protocol for a rule, as well as a schedule for when it's effective. IP ranges for start/destination locations and port ranges can be configured to allow or deny certain types of traffic. While the settings here are more powerful than what you can do using the other pages, for most applications, configuration of the Virtual Server or Special Applications page can get things working, and you won't have to work with the settings here.

There's also a parental controls page that allows you block URLs by keyword ("sex", "georgebush", "johnkerry") or create a list of allowed or blocked domains. This is of limited usage, IMO, since it'd be hard to create a good list this way without getting a lot of false positives. A DMZ option is also provided, allowing you to place a single computer based on IP address in a zone that exposes it to all inbound traffic. You shouldn't need to use this option with proper configuration, but it is provided nonetheless. It's not recommended as then this PC loses all of the security provided by the DI-624.

The Wireless Performance page allows you to set certain wireless parameters, but you shouldn't need to adjust many of these. In the latest firmware, the options of SSID Broadcast, 802.11g Only Mode, and Super G mode have been moved to the more general Wireless Section, beside options such as SSID, and encryption. This change is for the better as it consolidates the commonly-used settings better.

Misc. options.

Virtual Cable tester.

Log page.

The Misc. options allow you to block WAN side pings, a nice feature, and allow you to enable or disable UPNP. If you don't need to use UPNP (if you don't have any programs that use UPNP) then it'd probably be best to disable it. Gaming, when enabled, probably allows more types of inbound packets (such as UDP packets, typically used for real-time applications such as gaming or streaming media) so that certain online games will work better. It's typically needed for Xbox Live or some multiplayer PC games, though it may not be required, and you should probably only enable it if you're having troubles.

The cable tester feature is something new, and it's useful for diagnosing rudimentary physical network problems such as bad cables. Other features include a Dynamic DNS client; this service allows you to connect to either Dyndns.org, EasyDns.com, or No-IP.com and update your IP address with them. This is a feature I'll be using, and it's easier than having to download a software client and configure it. You can also set the time on the router (used for log purposes) or setup an NTP server so that the router will automatically update/set its time.

Administration options allow you to update the firmware from within the web browser, or save the settings to your HDD for loading them later. You can also set up remote administration so that you can log in to the web-based configuration from a PC on the WAN/Internet side. Unless you absolutely need this, I wouldn't enable it, even though it's password-protected. It's disabled by default.

On the whole, setup was fairly easy; though there are a lot of configuration options and many things you can change, the basic setup was fairly easy and was completed within 10 minutes. D-Link's easy to use interface and excellent Help section, along with their well-written install guide aided in this respect.

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