Digital Trends

D-Link DI-624 XtremeG

May 28th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

Advanced Features Setup

As mentioned earlier, the DI-624 has a host of advanced features, many of which probably won't be used by the average consumer. But its nice to know that D-Link took the time to add them.

One great feature is the ability to remotely manage the router — and your network — from anywhere on the Internet. This is easily enabled by going to the ‘Tools' menu and checking the ‘Remote Management' feature. The default port is 8080, but you can also select ports 80, 88, or 1080. Once the feature has been applied, you can log in from anywhere on the Internet with your admin credentials just by accessing your router's IP address at the port you specified.

The DI-624 also has a built-in clock and it can also obtain the current time by accessing any Internet time server. The importance of this is that the device allows you to schedule access for a variety of applications.

Say for instance you want to have an FTP server on your network but you don't want it to be accessible when you are gaming because it will hog your precious bandwidth. The ‘Virtual Server' settings of the DI-624 allow you to either manually turn on and off access to the FTP computer on your network or schedule a window of accessibility. The time schedule allows you to forward the FTP traffic to the right computer only during the hours you specify. Anyone trying to access the service during the blocked time period will not be able to do so. We set up an FTP server to test this function and it worked flawlessly.

D-Link also provides ‘Parental Control' content blocking and filtering options that allow you to determine what sites can or can not be accessed, however this service can not be configured for specific times. URL blocking allows you to block specific URLs or URLs that contain certain words. For instance, we added the word ‘soft' to the list, and the router would not let us access the sites http://www.microsoft.com/, http://www.grisoft.com/, http://www.rarsoft.com/ and presumably any other site with the word ‘soft' in it. When a site is blocked, the Web browser returns a white page that reads “401 The web site is blocked by administrator”.

The DI-624 allows you to schedule the availability of features such as FTP with a timer.