Sam's Insane Ravings

My DLink DSM-520 broke itself last week.

It said there was a new firmware update and I finally got sick of telling it "no" everytime I turned it on and it wanted to upgrade. So I picked "yes" and crossed my fingers.

All seemed well, until it stopped playing my divx movies, preferring to lock up completely.

I gave it a few days thinking to myself they'll have to put up a new version to fix this sometime soon, but Kian wanted to watch his videos (well maybe we wanted him to watch the Farsi ones) so I did some googling.

Turns out version 1.03 plays divx files slowly for large numbers of people, but I'd waited long enough that 1.04 was out which fixed it for those people. When I checked my machine it was already 1.04 - and still crashing...

It turns out the firmware authors are video game players from way back since the only way I could fix was to convince the machine that the 1.02 firmware I had was in fact newer than the 1.04 version it had installed. It checks an ftp site for updates and the description from someone of how to get it to use your own ftp site instead of DLinks was ridiculous to say the least.

Go on, how would you do that? Setup a DNS cache and map ftp.dlink.com to the IP of your local FTP server, right? Not whomever wrote the garbage "howto" I read, they though it'd be better to setup one of your local machine to have the IP that ftp.dlink.com maps to and hence get the requests that way...

Back to the video games. I found another post that mentioned a much better method with far less hassle, apparently you can telnet into the DLink and set the ftp site it uses via "cfg" executable. You get it to start up the telnet daemon by doing:

Go to the "Upgrade firmware" screen and then on the remote press: menu, page up, page up, page down, 2. Up pops a dialog box saying the telnet daemon has been started and I telnet in, point it to my local FTP server, and it merrily downloads what it thinks is 1.05 and downgrades to 1.02.

Videos now play fine again.

OK, so not the perfect game, that'd be shooting the moon four times for the win in four hands without scoring any points. Close enough for government work though.