Advance and Be Mechanized

Besides reports of problems between MacBooks (or Apple AirPort in general) and D-Link's DI-614+ wireless router, I couldn't find any useful information of how to make the beauty and the beast to play nicely together, so here's my experience in case in can help somebody.

No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the Macbook to connect to the D-Link POC access point using any form of WAP encryption, it would connect just fine as an open network. I reckon this wasn't a problem of the mac wireless since I had visitor's laptops that wouldn't connect to the D-Link router either. I guess this crappy router is safer for being quirky.

Apple has some interesting notes about WEP passwords, but that didn't help.

I didn't want to shell out $80 or so for a new wifi router, especially when I don't need 802.11g at 55Mbps speed and they don't sell in retail stores older "b" models anymore. I wonder how many people that get the new routers as upgrades have an Internet connection close to 55Mbps.

So finally what did the trick was upgrading the firmware of the wi-fi router. In the admin page (default is http://192.168.0.1) the section is reached by going to the "Tools" tab and then "Firmware". There's a link there to D-Link's TechSupport and after some navigation you can download the latest firmware (Current Firmware Version: 3.44 Firmware Date: 16 Nov 2005) and flash the router.

In Advance -> Performance I lowered the beacon interval range and that seemed to improve the wireless data rate.

For security I'd recommend besides the WEP encryption (of course) setting in Advance -> Filter a MAC filter and in Advance -> Performance checking the "Disabled" for SSID broadcast.