Setup & Administration

Once plugged in, I immediately directed my browser to 192.168.1.1, the router’s default address. There is an EZSetup utility on the included CD for those so inclined, but it doesn’t do anything that the web-based admin page does not.

Upon logging in with the default credentials, I was greeted with this screen. What struck me immediately was the color scheme. The color of a router’s web-admin page is not something that normally registers with me, but whoever designed this layout made it stand out–in a bad way. Still, it’s tolerable in short bursts, which is all you really need for configuring a router. The layout is clear enough, with the list of configuration pages along the left and a set of common tasks in the center.

I opted to run the Quick Setup wizard, to see what all it would cover. First up is time-zone selection. Simple enough, and the time zones are all properly labeled.

Next up is configuring your internet connection. As with previous pages, the grammar is a little broken, but serviceable enough. The choice of connection type here dictates which information it will ask for next. As I’m on a residential cable line, the configuration is pretty simple: use DHCP to get IP and DNS info, and move on.

With the upstream taken care of, the configuration script next asks for information about the wireless network you want to set up. It defaults to an unencrypted connection with the SSID of “default”, which you definitely want to change. Support for WEP encryption is included, presumably for legacy purposes, as well as WPA-PSK and WPA-Radius. Since WEP can be cracked in seconds by even the most casual of intruders, I strongly recommend using WPA-PSK with a long, random passphrase if you want any kind of real security.

With the Quick Setup script completed, I next went to the Status page, to see what info it provided. On the first page, we see info for the uplink, the attached printer (if any) and the router’s LAN interface.

Here, you can tell the router to operate in one of three different modes, with a broad swath of features turned on or off as appropriate:

Home Gateway is probably the most common mode, here the router acts as the go between for your computers and the broadband internet connection. Services like UPnP and DDNS are turned on, as well as NAT address translation.
Router is for using the 520gU as a router in a larger network. NAT address translation gets turned off, as well as DDNS and UPnP.
Access Point is possibly the “dumbest” mode the 520gU can operate in, here it behaves like a switch with a WiFi AP attached. No network services are turned on, and the WAN/uplink port is disabled.

Bandwidth Management lets you do a crude sort of QoS, assigning relative priorities to three broad categories of traffic with a few clicks. In practice, this had no measurable effect on throughput or latencies at any point.