[ntp:questions] Re: D-link and hardcoded ntp servers

Richard B. Gilbert rgilbert88 at comcast.net
Thu Apr 13 21:33:22 UTC 2006


Thomas Tornblom wrote:

> Having read Poul-Hennings open letter, and finding that I had one of
> the affected routers, I quickly reconfigured it to use the swedish ntp
> pool instead, only to find out that this crap product can't handle
> that without crashing :-(
> 
> It can also not use an ntp server on the LAN side, apparently, as all
> my attempts to use one of my internal NTP-servers failed miserably.
> 
> I have now had D-link routers for almost three years, and I am ready
> to declare them to be utter crap, or rather the programmers writing
> code for them.
> 
> My first router was a D-link 804H, which regularly mixed up sessions,
> if I was running multiple sessions of the same type (uucp over
> tcp). After much struggle I got a firmware version that worked.
> 
> When the 804H broke down last summer, I quickly needed a replacement
> while I got the broken one fixed/replaced, and I was handed a D-link
> 624, with 108 Mbps wlan.
> 
> The firmware in that router is the worst piece of crap I have ever
> seen. There is almost nothing you can change in the config on that
> router without the router having to reboot. And if you change almost
> anything from the default, you better watch out so that it won't do
> cyclic restarts.
> 
> After installation it was running fairly well, until I by accident
> noticed some frequent unknown multicast traffic on my lan. I found out
> that this was UPNP, Universal Plug and Play, and that it was the
> router sending out the crap. I found a radio button in the web gui
> that would disable this, so I disabled it. Little did I know then that
> this was the start of multiple daily reboots of the router.
> 
> As I had changed a lot of other things as well, I did not immediately
> connect UPNP and the reboots. I logged a service call with the Swedish
> support, and they gave me several different firmware versions to try,
> including some betas, all to no avail. They even replaced the router,
> and this did nothing to improve things.
> 
> As the crap router can not reliably save and restore the config
> between firmware versions, and the backup is in unreadable binary
> format, you better do all configuration manually after each firmware
> upgrade, and after a while I got bored fixing everything, so I started
> doing the absolute minimum, and noticed that the router would then
> stop restarting. It was then just a matter of changing one thing at a
> time until it started acting up again, which happened to be when I
> disabled UPNP.
> 
> After reporting this, I finally got a firmware where I could reliably
> disable UPNP, and I have been running this firmware up until tonight,
> when I noticed that router has now restarted everyday since I manually
> changed the ntp server. That version could at least get the time from
> the pool servers when it booted, but would crash each time it would do
> its regular syncs.
> 
> I found that new firmware was available, and it specifically mentions
> some ntp fixes, which I assume is to remove gps.dix.dk as the ntp
> server to use. So I downloaded that, and (manually) configured the
> router again, and selected se.pool.ntp.org as the ntp server to
> use. Apparently the router can not handle this as it will not get the
> time at all from that address, with the latest firmware. It will still
> not be able to get the time from my internal server.
> 
> The support line is closed for easter, so I will have to call them
> next week.
> 
> Another, incredibly stupid problem, with this routers firmware is that
> the virtual server settings will not allow you to redirect different
> ports on the wan side to different systems, using the same port, on
> the lan side.
> 
> I found that when I tried to set up two virtual services for ssh,
> where port 22 on the wan side would go to port 22 on system A on the
> lan side, and port 10022 on the wan side would go to port 22 on system
> B on the lan side. That was not allowed, and the support said that
> this was by design! :-( OTOH it would probably have taken at least 10
> firmware respins to get that working.
> 
> The conclusion is that I will never buy a D-link product again. My
> time is worth more to me than having to play with this, which is a
> pity as they are pretty simple to set up.
> 
> Thomas

You get what you pay for.  DLink and Linksys routers are cheap and it 
shows.   The Linksys BEFR81 routers claim DHCP client/server support but 
do not fully implement the protocol as described in RFC 2131.

I'm thinking of getting a Cisco SOHO router in the hope that it will be 
better; it certainly costs enough more that the customer should be 
entitled to expect more.  Does anyone have experience with the Cisco 
model 91 or 731?





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