Well you may have noticed the website was down for a few days. Another router died.
As the cisco branded router had decided to become a brick I grabbed a cheap DLINK DSL-2750B; the first I could get my hands on that looked like it may do the job… I was on call this week and didn’t want to have to drive to work every time the pager went off, so fastest fix.
Well the setup was easy until it came to the port forwarding bit. The DSL-2750B flat out refused to allow port 80 to be forwarded to my internal webserver.
The old cisco router happily knew what the external interface was and allowed port 80 to be forwarded. The DSL-2750B refused to forward port 80 saying it was needed by the management interface; it obviously cannot distinguish between internal and external traffic… well maybe it can but the web interface to configure the router obviously doesn’t.
The DLINK forums had a lively discussion on it; primarily focussed on a total lack of support from the DLINK support staff (discussion started in 2010 and seems to be a user forun as there appeared to be no posts from any support staff) and what a stupid design it was. Interestingly one of the posts implied that at least one of the users managed to bring up the router admin login web page from an external address; I will have to look into that when I get time but I’m assuming that was a user configuration issue as obviously people have been trying all sorts of wierd combination to get it working.
Anyway, the last entry on those two forum pages has what may be the solution; the discussion is linked to above. I just need to see if it does actually work next time I am at an external site; until then I am fairly confident the https port is forwarding correctly anyway.
The cisco router also had a option to prevent any administration activity across the wireless connection (ie: only a cables connection could reconfigure the router). That seems to be missing from the dlink one, at least I cannot find it. But as it does allow wireless MAC filtering that will hopefully not be an issue.
On the brighter side; with a working router I have external internet connectivity again so can actually browse the forums to see if I can stick with this router long term or need to get a more useful one :-).
