alastair 23 July 2010

I just replaced my Asus DSL-N13 with a new DLink DSL-2740B ADSL modem as the Asus unit would not allow me to access servers (such as mail servers) that are hosted on my local network and port forwarded from the router, when the computer attempting the connection is also within the local network.

Imagine my dismay when the new router had a similar web interface, and exhibited the same problem!

Fortunately, I do have a solution. It turns out the firmware (2.34) for the DLink unit on the Australian website is not the most recent. Instead, go to DLink's Taiwanese website and download the latest firmware for the C3 revision, which works just fine on my C2 hardware (4.15 at the time of writing).

The new firmware adds a number of SNAT rules in a new chain "NAT_LOOPBACK" which correspond to each port forwarded. These rules make it look like the router is originating the connection to the local servers.

Bart (not verified) Fri, 29/10/2010 - 18:27

Hello Alastair,

Thank you very much for the pointer. Yesterday I tried the 4.15 firmware, and was indeed able to get the loopback working. However, I could not connect to my Wifi network anymore. The Wifi was visable with good signal quality, but I never could actually connect to the wifi. Have you tried this?

Thanks,

Bart

alastair Fri, 29/10/2010 - 18:55

I find WIFI on this firmware is erratic. I need to disable then re-enable WIFI manually to get it to work. It then dies when under high load.

The system also forgets about WIFI after a reboot, and shows as disabled on next boot.

I am yet to find a solution to this problem.