Larry Brouwer

This morning started out with not being able to check my emails on my local web server. I also wasn’t able to browse to my web site either. I quickly determined that my D-Link DIR-655 (hardware version: A3) router was at fault. After logging into the router, and opening the Advanced menu, I discovered that none of my Virtual Servers were configured. They had all somehow vanished!

I’ve been having troubles with this router for some time now, and it appears to only be getting worse (I’ve posted on this before here). I’ve recently upgraded the firmware as well to version 1.33NA. I went out to the D-Link support forums and found DIR-655 Virtual Server/Port Forwarding Config doesn’t stay. This post says that you have to enable SecureSpot, reboot, change the virtual servers, reboot, disable SecureSpot, reboot in order to keep the virtual settings.

Another post from the D-Link forums Virtual Servers Settings not persisting comments that the next firmware version 1.34 beta may solve the problems. I’ve been reluctant to install a beta version of the firmware, but I’m now frustrated enough to try it. So here goes…

First, I went to the D-Link ftp firmware download site to download the latest beta firmware. Click on Beta, then Click on Firmware, click on dir655_fw_134b03NA_beta.zip and save it to the desktop. Right click on zip file and extract it here.

Next, log into the DIR-655 and Click Tools | System and Save to Local Hard Drive to save the current settings.  Next, Click Tools | Firmware | Browse and find the firmware C:\dir655_fw_134b03NA_beta\DIRA4_FW134b03NAbeta.bin. Then Click Upload.

This process will disconnect you from the Internet. Be sure to close any open connections you may have open. The process will take a couple minutes to complete. The router will automatically reboot and bring you back to the Login screen.

Next, I logged back into the router and checked the configuration settings. At first, it appeared that my Virtual Servers were still configured, but when I attempted to browse my web site, it wouldn’t pull up. So I went back into the router, and after navigating around a bit, I then went back into the Virtual Server page, and no servers were listed.

So I then navigated to Tools | System and reloaded the firmware settings from my hard drive. All settings appear to be fine (for now). I’ll update this post if anything new develops.

Today started out with discovering our phone wasn’t working. Since we have Vonage or Voice over IP (VOIP), this usually means our Internet is down. At least I know when the Internet is down! My usual routine for this sort of thing is to first unplug everything (the cable modem, router, switch, and the Vonage router), let it sit for a good minute or so to discharge any kind of inductance build-up (or whatever), and then re-plug everything back in starting from the modem, then the router, then the switch, then the VOIP box.

So, as usual (so I thought) this procedure worked. Our phones were working again. But when I logged on to my laptop, I soon discovered there was more to the situation this time. When I opened up IE, my browser immediately took me to a site securespot and told me that my machine did not have access to the Internet. Since I’ve had some prior experience with Secure Spot, I knew that it had to be something wrong with my D-Link DIR-655 router. I logged into my router and checked the configuration. It seemed fine. I rebooted it. I still had the problem. I then began searching the D-Link forums, and sure enough, there is a hornets nest of very upset D-Link users experiencing similar problems. I had recently upgraded my router to the latest firmware, 1.33NA because the router had been randomly dropping my Virtual Servers List. This was problematic because I’m using a single dynamic IP address and I need to NAT individual ports over to my web/email server. As a side-note the firmware upgrade to 1.33NA did not help this!

After pouring through many posts, here, here, here, and here,  it appears this latest buggy firmware is affecting the router in different ways. Secure Spot is one of them. Since I had tried out Secure Spot previously, and had registered my router with a trial (I was trying the feature out for a client who had some workers going to websites they shouldn’t have been), the firmware is still communicating with Secure Spot, even though my router clearly has that feature disabled. One option mentioned is to downgrade the firmware to 1.31RU, another is to try out a beta version located here (version 1.34b03NA is the latest as of this post). I really hesitate to do either of these, so I opted to ‘Reset’ the router back to its factory settings, and then I re-loaded the settings. This, (at least for the moment) has fixed my problems. I’ll probably wait until the next release of the firmware before upgrading if I don’t have much more trouble. If I do, I will give the latest beta version a try.

Next, I wanted to log into DotNetNuke to do some work on my website. I keep all my username/password information in KeePass Password Safe. If you have a lot of passwords to keep track of, I highly recommend it! I don’t know how I kept my password information before using this. Anyway, as I was saying, I wanted to get into my website to work on it, but I couldn’t find the username/password information anywhere. I had to think about this for a moment (don’t panic). How did I regain access to my website? Easy. I just logged into SqlServer and queried the aspnet_users table. Now I remember what user name I used! Now add them to KeePass, right?