D-Link Wireless Networking tips

[Michael Dryja]

After a few days of frustration, I finally got a new DWL-650+ card to
work in our LAN. Some background: we had a DWL-1000AP and DWL-650
cards, but I wanted to upgrade to the 900AP+ and the 650+ cards for a
variety of reasons. The old network setup worked fine. The new one
worked fine with TCP/IP (i.e., the Internet was accessible), but
accessing shared drives over Microsoft Networking did not.
Furthermore, the card wouldn't connect to the network until after
everything was loaded in my startup folder.

Here are some tips, therefore, that you may want to try if you have
similar problems. I'm using v3.05 of the 650+ driver software for
Windows 2000.

1) Once you've set up your wireless card, remove the Air Plus utility
from your startup folder. The wireless card will automatically
connect to the previously set AP. But, if you then run the Air Plus
utility automatically, it'll automatically disconnect as the Air Plus
utility initializes itself. In v3.06 and above drivers, you will have
to go to the network card's properties to select WEP manually,
however, if you are using WEP. This is not an issue with v3.05.

2) Most importantly and significantly, I've found that NetBeui over
the 650+ card just flat out did not work. It gave all sorts of
problems with Microsoft Networking. The solution is to disable it --
right-click on My Network Places, select the relevant network
connection, and un-check the box for NetBeui. Don't worry, file
sharing will still work, as file sharing works just fine over TCP/IP.
Note that you have to restart your computer to "unbind" file sharing
from NetBeui completely.

These two tips did the trick for me. YMMV.

- Mike.