D-Link DI-624 802.11g with WPA-PSK

A WPA story.

I got a D-Link DI-624 802.11g wireless router and a D-Link DWL-G650 card a few months ago. Good price and it runs the Atheros chipset with bonds two channels together to give a max bandwidth of 108Mbps. Supposedly WPA support was available in the router firmware but I could never get it to work. Then, last week, D-Link released firmware revision 2.36. A few people reported on their installs on the D-Link forum on Broadband Reports and, at the time I read them, things didn’t seem too bad. I installed it and it was a disaster! Reboots, disconnects and lost connections and I hadn’t even enabled WPA. So, I backed it off and things still didn’t come around until I’d done about 3 reboots of my laptop. D-Link removed the firmware from their site.

OK, I backed off and decided to wait. Just a few days ago, D-Link posted version 2.37. Good reports in the forums so, after about 24 hours, I installed it. Last night. Before I went to bed. From the wired computer. And then I went to bed.

Got up this morning and the router hadn’t rebooted all night. A good sign as it was rebooting every few minutes on 2.36. So, I connected my wireless laptop. No problems. Ran most of the morning and still no problems. OK, deep breath, take a System Restore point (that was the only thing that rescued me the last time I installed the WPA update). Run InstallWatch so I can see what’s changed on my system and install the WPA update. Things continue to run OK in WEP so I decide to enable WPA-PSK on the router and on the laptop.

Voila!

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