DWL-G810 wireless bridge

20.11.2008 21:49

I bought this D-link DWL-G810 wireless bridge a couple of years ago to connect a network segment in the basement of our house to the rest of the computers and the internet, since connecting them by real UTP cables proved pretty much impossible.

D-link DWL-G810

On the outside it's a simple box that has an ethernet socket on one end and a 802.11g connection on the other. What ever device you connect to it behaves like it would be connected by a wired network to all the computers on the local network, including those that are actually on the wireless LAN.

Well, that's the theory at least. In practice, I never could get it to work properly. The connection kept dropping, DHCP requests wouldn't get through and so on. Very annoying, since even once a machine managed to get an IP only each other webpage would open in a browser. So it has been accumulating dust in a corner ever since.

Now I've noticed that D-link released some new firmware updates (which is pretty surprising for a device that will soon be 3 years old). It's quite confusing though, since you got U.K., German and Australian departments of D-link, each claiming a different version of the firmware is the latest. And apparently this product has been discontinued in U.S.

I've tried 3.16b77 (from the German site), 3.15b70 (from the U.K. site) and 3.15b73 (from the Australian site).

I've had most success with 3.15b73. So far, I haven't seen any connection drops with it and it also has the added bonus that the admin page can be accessed from the wireless side, which seems impossible with other versions. Interestingly, other two versions didn't bring any obvious improvements over the old 2.2 firmware, although they appear to be newer.

The device still has some interesting properties though. For example, inbound traffic that you send to its IP via the wireless interface can be seen on the wired side, which is weird. So if you ping it from Wi-Fi, you see your ping packets on the wire with tcpdump, but not the answers. Same for HTTP traffic to the admin page (including the plain-text password for HTTP basic authentication).

It's also constantly searching for multicast-capable clients on the wireless side for some reason (no idea why):

21:41:28.394980 xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (oui Unknown) > Broadcast, ethertype ARP (0x0806), length 60: arp who-has ALL-SYSTEMS.MCAST.NET tell 0.0.0.0

For the record, this is hardware H/W Ver: C1 (product number ending with BEUC1) and I'm using it with a WPA-PSK protected network.

Posted by Tomaž | Categories: Digital

Comments

I have been running the C firmware on B units, without any problems; this is welcome since the C version is not available in the United States.

Posted by shiekh

Hey,

you have to mind that the DWL-810 works in transparent mode. Meaning it will "emulate" the MAC of the device connected to it via ethernet to the wireless side. Everything should be working fine if you connect just one pc to it. But if you want to connect multiple PCs through this device you will have to use a router instead of a switch. A router will connect to the WLAN with is own MAC and allow the PC behind him to establish connections.
How it works:

PCs->Router->DWL-810->Router/AP->Internet

As 2nd router im using DI-604 but everyone should do. You will have to set up different IP networks to make it work. Ill give you an example:

PCs(192.168.1.X)->(192.168.1.1)Router(192.168.0.3)->DWL-810(192.168.0.2)->(192.168.0.1)Router/AP(public ip)->Internet

You have two sperate ip networks in this example. The network 192.168.1.X and the 192.168.0.X. The last one will have direct access to the internet through his router. The second router's WAN side has to be set to STATIC IP, which would be a IP adress in the network of the main router. As this implies you will have to connect the WAN port from the sub router to the DWL-810.

I have this running to connect two houses with only one internet connection and it works perfectly fine. with some DIY directional antennas its a wireless bridge for about 150 bugs.

Posted by HellraZor

Thanks for the advice HellraZor.

However you also need a router to set this up and if you don't have an old one lying around it's probably better to buy a new wireless router that supports bridging. Plus you get rid of the pain of having to deal with two levels of NAT.

Posted by Tomaž

You are right. It can be a mess with port forwarding and so on, but it is the cheapest solution, i think. As far as i know most D-Link AP only support bridging to a AP of the very same model. Depending what model you are using right now, you should consider if its worth the money, since you might have to buy two new APs/routers.

Posted by HellraZor

Some updated links for firmware, should anybody still be interested:

ftp://files.dlink.com.au/products/dwl-g810/REV_C/Firmware/

ftp://lizzi555.dyndns.org/Download/WLAN/DLINK/DWL/DWL-G810/Firmware/Old/

Posted by Phil Uren

Add a new comment


(No HTML tags allowed. Separate paragraphs with a blank line.)