Media for The OTHER problem with Netgear WGT624 (and probably others)

The OTHER problem with Netgear WGT624 (and probably others)

This isn't exactly a wireless issue. But it did happen with wireless devices and people buying those might see this some day:

When I first got those 2 Netgear routers, one thing I found was that the instructions said to use a browser URL like:

formatting link

to connect to the router. I just assumed they had configured the DNS for that domain name to have an A-record for 192.168.1.1 or whatever IP they made default if not that usual one. But it didn't work. I actually got the Netgear web site. Strange. So I checked the actual DNS:

routerlogin.com. 3600 IN A 64.202.189.170

WTF? Idiots! Since 192.168.1.1 was pinging OK, I just went to:

http://192.168.1.1/ as is usual for most other products. But that got me the same web site. Now this is getting strange. Surely they didn't package their whole web site into this box. I cut off my internet connection and tried again. This time nothing. It just hung waiting. But then I could see that a redirect had been made to their web site. So I put in a fake zone for routerlogin.com in my DNS server to fool the browser, pointing it to

192.168.1.1 to see what that would do. Maybe their Windows program (not in use here since I'm running on Linux) was intercepting lookups of the routerlogin.com domain. As feared, it caused a redirect loop.

So maybe their Windows program was actually _routing_ 64.202.189.170 to the attached device? I thought about testing that, but never got around to it.

In the documentation I downloaded, I found where it had some examples which showed configuration URLs with pathnames in them. I tried one of those, but with "192.168.1.1" instead of "routerlogin.com":

http://192.168.1.1/basicsetting.htm That got me in OK, so I just set up a local page with that as a link along with all my setting info.

What I'm still curious about is how Netgear expected this to work. Now I can see they might want to have more people visit their web site to do things like get them to register so they can send them more marketing junk. But it took me in a round about way to their main web site, not one that would do something like urge me to register the product and give me a real working link once I did.

And what if I had no internet connection at all because this device was to be that connection only after it gets set up?

What were those guys thinking, especially with http://192.168.1.1/ not even working (because it redirects to

formatting link

instead).

The wireless HP printer I bought, and the cheap nameless bridge (MAC lookup revealed Senao International of Taiwan) my sister-in-law gave me, worked just fine with http://192.168.1.1/ to reach their setup.