Fun With A D-Link DSL-G640T

Last week my house was struck by lightning, and, with a rather exciting burst of blue electro-gubbins that made my hair stand on end, my ADSL modem blew up. It was, as far as I know, the worst ADSL modem in the world ever: the dreaded Speedtouch USB supplied by BT as part of a sinister bid to test Mac users in much the same way Our Lord tested Job. So the lightning strike was a boon.

Not having internet access to research the best replacement, I nipped to PC World and bought the first ADSL modem and combined wireless router I could find that said Mac OS on the box, a D-Link DSL-G640T.

It is brilliant.

Set up is beyond simple: First, connect the box into your ADSL line, switch it on, and fire up Airport. Then point your browser at its IP address, which gets you a simple web-based interface to enter the username and password for your ISP. That’s it.

Or, rather, that should’ve been it. I hit a snag at this point - I could ping the external IP address of the router, and connect to it and the other computer on the network, but had no joy when it came to accessing the world outside. This leads me to the real reason I’m shilling for D-Link: their technical support.

Usually, when I ‘phone tech. support, the person on the end of the line will run screaming at the mention of OS 10.3.3, even at the mention of Macintosh. Not so my man at D-Link, who, before I had a chance to explain the problem in full, said, ‘OS X? You set it up with Safari, I bet. Try Internet Explorer.’ I did. It worked, and we had a brief but illuminating chat about the shortcomings of Safari’s javascript engine.

Today (and this is the real real reason I’m shilling for D-Link), I had to ‘phone again, because I was having trouble with port forwarding. I serve up a little website from my old laptop, for when I’m out of the house, with my todo list, an archive of pieces I’ve written recently and the latest posts to Submit Response; but since I installed the DSL-G640T, it was nowhere to be seen, replaced by the router’s configuration interface. When I called to find out how to fix this, D-Link’s support person pointed out that I was being a bit of a thicko for not realising I couldn’t access the site from my local network by pointing at the external IP address (news to me) and offered to check whether the port forwarding was working as intended.

I told him my IP address and, after a brief pause, he said, ‘Why are you mirroring the Submit Response weblog? Do you read it a lot?’

So there you have it. Who cares if the DSL-G640T is a great, easy to use product? Who cares if the company’s technical support staff are helpful and well-informed? Not me, I just like them for giving my weblogging ego a colossal boost!

Posted at 1pm on 13/05/04 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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