Rating: 
Summary: Failed connectivity
Review: I could never get the item to access my Verizon DSL link. Was installing it into a Dell 700MH system running Windows 98. Spent several hours on the phone with D-Link who finally advised me to give up and try another base station. I did and purchased the Microsoft MN-100 which installed with ease. ...
Rating: 
Summary: Great Router!
Review: I purchased one of these a few weeks ago and its been working like a champ. I have cable service and those guys were charging me a large premium every month for my extra computers. This little box took care of that problem.The setup was amazingly simple. I think it took all of 1 minute to setup and I had all 3 of my computers browsing the internet. It will even clone your mac address so you provider can't tell its not your main computer! I love the web page interface used in setup as well. After I had it a little while, I went to the dlink webpage and found updated firmware. This had one confusing step (the fact that you don't extract the bin file, you must leave it as that despite what they say), but after i figured that out it went smoothly. It was nice that the router protected me from loading the wrongly encoded file (this would have really messed up the unit). I'm using it now, and playing DAOC, surfing the web and other games and so far, no problems. I also went to a security website and had it do a portscan on my network, and it classified me as a "hard target" due to the firewall features of the DI-604. It wouldn't let any intruders initiate contact with my system. Neato!
Rating:
Summary: Noice
Review: I'm burning a cd across the LAN while surfing the WAN and writing this review. The router has no problems routing and a pretty good intuitive personal firewall.
Rating:
Summary: So-far so-good, works great with SWBell DSL (PPPoE)
Review: I was a bit nervous about setting up my home network even though I work in the Information Technology field. The main reason was that every inexpensive 4 port broadband router (D-Link, Linksys, Netgear, etc.) had about 20% of their reviews being just terrible. You would think by reading them that buying that product was the worst thing to ever happen to the reviewer. The D-Link 604 quick setup guide explained everything exactly as needed for a quick and painless setup process. Both my windows 98 machine and Win XP machines connected after just a few short steps, all discussed in the setup guide. The connections have never gone down, and the D-Link surprised me by remembering the config settings after I accidently unplugged it. So far the internet gaming connections have worked without a hitch (no special port settings were needed, although D-Link supports opening up specific network ports) and a port scanner I used showed all ports to be in stealth mode as I expected. I haven't used the DMZ feature yet so I can't speak to how it performs (or doesn't). One note: The D-Link I got has some advanced "firewall" features that the earlier 604 box covers I saw in retail stores don't mention. I imagine it includes the firmware update that everyone recommends. Since all of the cheap routers have their share of terrible reviews, why not get the least expensive one? [Price]can't be beat...
Rating: 
Summary: Great router with one caveat
Review: I have a ton of D-Link products: a router, two wireless devices, four NIC's, a switch, etc, in various network settings. I really trust this company's networking products. I bought this router to share a DSL connection, and so far, it works fine. This is really a breakthrough router in terms of the price and the performance and features one gets. By default, the router acts as a DHCP server on the local LAN, and you set the router to obtain an IP address on the WAN side (DHCP, static, PPPOE, etc). One thing that confused me was that Earthlink (via Covad) used PPPOE, but the Broadmax modem they gave us took care of all that. The modem was actually a DHCP server assigning private addresses on the 172.16.0.0/16 subnet. In other words, my DSL is being NAT'ted twice--an unnecessary inefficiency. Thus, remote administration of the router doesn't work because of the DSL modem's own NAT firewall. But this isn't the router's fault at all. Now to the caveat. The router is configured totally via a web interface. This is very good since all modern operating systems can configure the browser--no special software is required. Thus a pure Unix or Linux network can use this router. But there is a major flaw in the web-based interface. I am blind. I use a special program, called a screen reader, that interfaces with Windows and Internet Explorer 6 to verbalize the screen. The program cannot interpret graphics on the Web. It relies on the W3C standard of labeling images with alternative text, which the screen program verbalizes in place of the graphic. This is particularly important for graphics which are hyperlinks, as one can imagine. The problem is, all the hyperlinks in the administration interface of this router are images, and these images are not labeled properly with any alt= attribute. This is so easy and requires adding a short bit of code to the HTML, yet D-Link overlooked this now widespread, famous, and basic accessibility rule. I have wrote to D-Link about this, and they can correct this in a firmware upgrade, but they have not responded to this at all. The initial oversight knocks my rating down a star, and D-Link's lack of a response (after a week) knocks my rating down another star, so my rating is subject to change.
Rating:
Summary: Great Product
Review: I've been using this router for about 6 months now and have had no problems. Although it lacks features that more expensive routers include, it is fine for the average user. The setup was simple as was upgrading the firmware. This is a great router at a very affordable price!
Rating:
Summary: Fast speeds, Small footprint, Good Enough Quality
Review: I expect to get a DSL/Cable with 4-port switch with built in firewall when I pay for a product that claims to be that. Well I got what I expected plus more. Not only am I able to assign my own firewall rules and parental controls but I am able to schedule those by day and time. As an example I could setup the firewall to allow any program that requires certain ports to be open to use (i.e. WinMX, Online Games, etc.) to work on a specific IP address but only until 10pm so my kids aren't up all night playing games, and sharing files. You can also set a schedule for the parental controls so that certain URLs or URLs with keywords you designate can't be accessed until after 11pm/when the kids are asleep. This is a very nice feature that I didn't know I was going to be able to use. There are a ton of features here that you wouldn't expect to get for a router that is priced this low. I am very surprised and pleased with this router.
Rating:
Summary: good router--GREAT tech support
Review: I bought the di604 because I wanted to be able to share broadband (cable modem) access with more than one computer. After having first bought an ethernet hub, thinking that was what I wanted, then returning it when I discovered that I needed a router, I picked the di604 based mostly on price and the customer reviews here. Set-up took just a minute, plug in the cords and you're done. The software is easy too, a web-based interface that the paper manual walks you through. It sounds like other customers had no problem at all with the software setup; for me, however, it didn't work at all. As soon as I finished the setup steps, I found I had gone from broadband on one machine to no internet at all on any machines. Needless to say, I called tech support. Needless to say, I waited on queue for a long time. But what makes me give this product five stars, after using it for less than a day, is the outstanding job that d-link tech support did. My problem turned out to be very odd and very difficult, and this guy patiently, politely and doggedly kept walking me through solutions until one worked perfectly. That alone sets the company apart in my opinion. Add the fact that the router works as advertised, and this was certainly a five-star shopping trip. The only caveat I would include is that I haven't yet figured out how to share files between my two computers. Clearly that's one of the router's intended functions, and other customers have said in their reviews that it works. I don't doubt that it's there and I'll figure it out sooner or later, but there are no specific instructions in the documentation for this functionality. Not enough to subtract a star from my rating, but if I find I just CAN'T figure it out, you can bet I'll be back here, writing another review with a couple fewer stars. All in all, I would heartily encourage anyone who wants to set up a home network or use their cable/dsl on more than one computer to choose this router. And it's cheap!
Rating:
Summary: Problems running a webserver behind firewall
Review: After my Linksys BEFSR41 v2 died an unexpected death after 2 years of flawless performance, I contacted their tech support and was told repeatedly to try and reset / power cycle the unit. After this didn't work, I was then told that 2 years was about the expected lifespan for the unit, and that I should contact them again in the future if I had anymore difficulties with one of their other products. Yeah right, I told myself. So I went out and bought the DI-604 vE. The feature set looked great, setup was simple, and the download speeds were the same as those of the Linksys. Then came the sadness. I then tried to access a web-server I was running from home behind the firewall on port 8080. The "virtual server" settings were easy enough to configure, and in a few minutes I was able to access my web-server from outside the firewall. HOWEVER, many of my pages were hanging, or only loading part of the content. I flashed the router with the latest firmware. No luck. I then turned on the debugging and dropped-packets options on the DI-604's logging screen (nice feature), and found that I was repeatedly getting an error saying that the "do_nat[1] buffer was too small". I also noticed that the router was dropping packets from the LAN to the WAN on port 8080, which was weird since some pages being served on 8080 weren't having any problems. I then set the port for the web-server in DMZ mode as a sanity check, and the pages then worked, but were VERY slow. I tried adding new IP filtering rules to open up the router, but nothing worked. So then I called D-Link's 24/7 tech hotline. I got someone who sounded like he spoke English as a first language, and I thought my worries were over. No such luck, I was promptly told that the "virtual server" options on the router were an "unsupported feature" and that there was nothing he could do to help me. (I was half expecting him to then tell me to reset/power cycle the unit.) On a side note, I tested my DI-604 with Gibson Research's ShieldsUP! port scanning service, and noticed that two of the ports I had left open (22, 443) were showing up as being closed. I never had this problem with my old Linksys. Besides my difficulties with port forwarding, I really liked the DI-604. I liked the logging capability, and stateful packet inspection (though this might have been what was causing my difficulties with the web server). I would recommend the DI-604 for anyone doing simple web-surfing, but I wasn't impressed with some of the "advanced features" that never worked right for me. So, now I'm in the market for a new router. The linksys is looking better every minute.
Rating:
Summary: DI-604
Review: I bought this router from Amazon and selected Super Saver Shipping. It arrived in only 3 days. The router was very easy to install using its web GUI and setup wizard. It also includes a firewall and now I can block ping requests coming in from the WAN interface whereas my Westell DSL modem couldn't do that. The Linksys EtherFast PCMCIA ethernet card on my KNOPPIX linux laptop couldn't talk to my 4-port Linksys switch (might be due to an auto-sensing problem) but it works perfectly with this router. This router has plenty of features for a very reasonable price.
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