Savannah W-ITS

Your mileage should vary, but for me this device was both a poor/bad investment and a trouble-shooting time hog. I picked this up at Office Depot for $20 (regular price ~$50.)  While relatively simple to configure (via a web interface) the device seems to have performance issues (i.e. both dropping established wireless connections as well as not working well with older wireless devices.)

I can’t imagine anyone without significant skill sets getting this gizmo to perform in a non-simple environment (i.e. more than one wireless device accessing the unit.)  As I researched the device I found a number of posts indicating that there were various problems with the device and folks were essentially having to turn off highly desirable features in order to just get basic use from the device (i.e. turning off wireless encryption – a very bad idea.)  In my case I enabled the syslog report feature and captured a number of messages which I used when searching for more information.

One post that I located suggested these steps:

1.  Choose Manual Wireless Setup
2.  Disable Wi-Fi Protect
3.  Disable Auto Channel Scan - set to CH. 7
4.  Set security mode to WPA-Personal
5.  Set WPA mode to WPA only
6.  Set Cipher to TKIP
Note: no reserved IP addresses, no MAC address filtering or other fancy
features employed

Having to take such measures when the product advertises itself as supporting XYZ is not a good indication – will this product be another legal problem for false advertising?

The tables below *appear* to be Cisco error codes and **should/may** also be relevant for the DIR-615 (I could NOT find any real information on this device, i.e. a truly technical manual that explains the log information.)

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Client Reason Codes (From a Cisco Manual)

This table lists client reason codes.

Client Status Codes

This table lists client status codes.

Table D-3 Client Status Code Descriptions and Meanings

Client Status Code	Description	Meaning
0	idle	Normal operation — no rejections of client association requests.
1	aaaPending	Completing an AAA transaction.
2	authenticated	802.11 authentication completed.
3	associated	802.11 association completed.
4	powersave	Client in powersave mode.
5	disassociated	802.11 disassociation completed.
6	tobedeleted	To be deleted after disassociation.
7	probing	Client not associated or authorized yet.
8	disabled	Automatically disabled by Operating System for an operator-defined time.

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Since the device does have some potentially desirable features (network filtering, firewalling, etc) I may be able to use it for those purposes, but, right now this is a return candidate.  $20 is too much to pay for a 4 port switch but that is what it looks like I have at the moment.

In a log file with ~4300 lines, 4155 lines contained the message “deauthenticate reason 7″ – the lines were generated when I attempted to use my Windows Mobile 6.0 device (and I have no problems with other wireless routers…)

Not sure how relevant this is but the DIR-615 appears to be using BusyBox (and embedded Linux variant) and perhaps some Mono code (ASP compiled for Linux.)

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