Customer would like to get his wireless router working with his broadband modem.

I get there, and to my dismay, I find out he has Telstra cable internet… Hmmm, this will be painful 🙁

I start out by looking at the router (d-link 4-port wireless router) settings and take note of all the important modem and router settings.

I then look at getting the dreaded telstra cable heartbeat to pass through the router. I find it uses port 5050.

I also find that plugging the modem into the router WAN port almost works (when I ping a site, the dns server returns its IP address (although the actual ping fails)

I setup the router to forward port 5050 to the main PC (which is running the heartbeat client). But no go.

I read somewhere that port 5051 also needs to be forwarded. I try that, but also no go.

I disable TIS (in case its blocking anything), but no go.

I also find the dlink site, indicating how to setup the router specifically for telstra cable. I figure: this looks much more promising… there is actually an area within the router, where you can setup a heartbeat client for telstra!

So I setup the router as per the instructions (eg setup the heartbeat server IP address for QLD), but still no go!!!

As a last resort, I take a close look at the troubleshooting guide from the dlink website… What? clone the MAC address! I’ve never had to do anything like that before… but I figure its worth a try… and this time everything works well. 

I could see the wife was wanting to get me off the computer, as she needed to do some work… so the pressure was on!

Anyway, once the router was going, I quickly setup the router WPA security, etc etc… then gave the PC back to a relieved wife. Then I went downstairs and setup the PC (that already had a wireless card and drivers installed).

The wireless setup took 10 minutes (after 1hr 50 minutes of fighting the router)… just a case of disabling the dlink utility. It seems that none of the vendors wireless utilities support wpa-psk using AES encryption… only the older (less secure) TKIP encryption… yet XP SP2 supports (and defaults to) AES… go figure!

Anyway another learning experience which might not be of much use in the future: During my research, I found that Telstra are going to be phasing out the heartbeat system (woohoo!!!).

Update:

Customer contacted me a week later, saying that the wireless PC is “taking over” and slowing down the internet connection. After a few questions, I find out that the wireless PC is running the heartbeat client, so I ask him to disable the heartbeat client from all PCs… there should only be 1 client per site.