a new non dlink router. Since the should be named f-link for a number of reasons.
Instead of trusting DLink with an off the shelf NAS, it might be easier to build your own with a Raspberry Pi running openmediavault hooked up to a couple of USB hard drives. It’s worked well for me for over 6 years now with no issue and could cost way less.
I built my own with an old PC, and it’s pretty easy. You can install TruNAS or OMV if you want, but I ended up just installing my distro of choice (OpenSUSE Leap in this case), set up BTRFS on my NAS drives in something similar to RAID 1, and set up a few services (Samba, Jellyfin, etc). TruNAS or OMV will make that initial setup a lot easier, so do that if you’re not confident.
The Raspberry Pi is not nearly fast enough for what I want it for, and I had an old PC laying around, so I figured I might as well reuse what I have. I started w/ a Phenom II x4 from 15 years ago, and recently upgraded to my Ryzen 1700. I plan to upgrade my NAS hardware whenever I upgrade my gaming PC to keep things recent-ish. Total power draw is somewhere around 50W, so a fair bit more than a Raspberry Pi, but only like 2x more due to the drive overhead (I use NAS-grade HDDs).
“Easier“, no. Not for the average person on the street.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve built several NAS over the years (dropped OMV for just Arch and the packages I want) and loaded OpenWRT (etc) on routers
But, building my own NAS, servicing my own car, repairing my own house, felling my own trees, at some point I’ll just lack knowledge and buy something simple / pay someone to do it… and that’s where cheap consumer electronics fits (unfortunately)
Except a lot of it doesn’t fit because tons of it is predatory trash sold as functional when one or two things can go wrong and ruin everything.
It’s hard to expect the layman to need something technical, not know enough technically to do it themselves, but have enough surface knowledge to not get ripped off. It’s like threading a needle of the perfect level of wisdom.
Like I’d wager the common every dude would look for a connected hard drive, maybe Western Digital because of the market saturation, but there’s just so much garbage online that half works.
Then there’s interconnectivity issues, software not being available cross-platform after already spending hundreds on hardware, Apple problems.
The average user is just set and ready to be ripped off at like, all angles.
Yup, and that’s why I largely recommend DIY. If you commit to DIY, you will do the necessary research to not get too ripped off, and you can usually start w/ stuff you have laying around anyway. In my case, I upgraded my old Phenom II from 15 years ago to a Ryzen 1700, so I used the old Phenom PC as my NAS and just needed to buy some drives (got WD Reds). I have since upgraded my 1700, so now that’s what’s in my NAS.
If you’re unwilling to put in the work to DIY, I recommend cloud services instead. This solves two problems:
- unsophisticated NAS owner likely won’t do regular offsite backups
- no hardware to get screwed on
So either commit to DIY, or use off-the-shelf cloud products. I cannot recommend anything in between.
Why do they say they’re prohibited to provide support? That a bad translation?
There right you and i should just buy a new one
Of a diffrent brand
Yup, my Mikrotik router is doing great years after I bought it, and I expect to keep getting updates into the future. I used to use a LinkSys router w/ DD-WRT and later OpenWRT, and I think those are still supported to this day.
Yeah openwrt and ddrwrt are just perfection. I recently switched out my isp eero router for a gl.inet flint 2. Adgaurdhome and setting up services have been a dream! And i could actaully see what my devices where sending packets.
MY SAMSUNG TV WAS PINGING TIKTOK WTF. blocked everything on my smart tv minus netflix and amazon. Because samsung tv uses AWS for channels
Wow, that’s terrible. I still need to get around to blocking my smart TV as well, since we only use Netflix and our Jellyfin install on it. Thanks for a reminder. :)
Had me in the first half
I mean this is pretty standard in all industries regardless of whether it’s a software flaw or a physical flaw in any other kind of product. What’s the likelihood of a vacuum manufacturer replacing a part in a 15 year old product that had a 1 year warrantee even if it’s a safety issue? Sure the delivery and installation is cheaper with software, but the engineering and development isn’t, especially if the environment for building it has to be recreated.
I work for a manufacturer with part catalogues going back to 1921, and while the telegraph codes no longer work, you could absolutely still order up a given part, or request from us the engineering diagram for it to aid in fabricating a replacement. You can also request service manuals, wiring diagrams, etc. Don’t all half-decent manufacturers do this?
That’s assuming you’re looking for a replacement part. This is redesigning the product to work differently to fix a flaw. Like if you made a vacuum company use a different gear because the existing one was too fragile. That’s likely not something you can just swap out. First you need an engineer to decide what kind of gear and redesign everything around it to make the gear fit properly as well as creating a way for it to be easily installed by the end user or their repair service. You’re ultimately changing the functionality of the original product. Yes it’s flawed functionality, but there are tons of flawed products out there.
Oh, most products and components go through multiple revisions to account for either flaws in the original design or to comply with local laws (for example, health and safety requirements that did not exist at time of original design). I believe it’s imperative for every business to keep on top of these things…but perhaps I’m a bit naive.
Sure, but then those new revisions that are currently being sold are what get updated. That’s perfectly reasonable. We don’t require physical products to go back and fix the old stuff they are no longer selling. If we said that a vacuum manufacturer has to go back and fix their old products for safety flaws to comply with modern standards, what about a company that has been around for 100 years? Do they have to go back and design and manufacture modern technology into those products that didn’t exist when they were made? What if only one person in the whole world is actually using that product anymore? How long do they need to continue to revise the product?
Just wait, someday there will be 3d printers that can assemble individual elements and then we can print off any old machine we like
Been there done that. Got the tee shirt.
While good support to customers is very valuable, trying to support a product that is decades old and shares nothing in common with current products is a plain waste of time energy and money.
It would require someone to search out all the documentation needed to make that one part, then you need to figure out the correct process to make said part, determine if you have material on hand or need to special order something, then try to find that one old jig/fixture needed amongst a building full of 100’s of such items for the right one. Then you need to be sure that the the complete fixture is there and nothing is worn out beyond use. Then you need to make time to insert this one-off semi-custom part into the manufacturing process.
By the time you do all this, that one 20 year old obsolete part will have perhaps cost you thousands of dollars and you still haven’t made the first piece of swarf. Imagine the shock and surprise that customer would have when they get the bill that accurately reflects the true cost.
Oh, I’ve seen or rather heard the gasps of surprise you speak of, my friend. I remember about ten years ago getting a request to source a specific part out to Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic. It was would have been pricier than just getting a whole new unit, for their purposes. We did provide them with the engineering drawings so that they could get a local shop to machine the parts, but I don’t know if they ever went that route.
Don’t all half-decent manufacturers do this?
No. That is phenomenally uncommon. To the point it’s almost unheard of.
Yes they do, but half decent manufacturers are extremely rare.
Now I wish you’d tell us what the company is so if I ever need anything in that industry, I’d know where to buy from.
I wish I could be more specific, truly, but I would be putting myself at serious risk of doxxing myself, and I’ve made fun of a lot of bad people across Lemmy (and Reddit, once upon a time) that I would be putting myself and others at risk of retribution.
This is why a number of countries have laws saying spare parts must be made available for a number of years past being sold. Well beyond what the warranty is.
How is this significantly different?
I’d also settle for releasing 3D models of out-of-production parts so they can be 3D-printed by enthusiasts.
Story time: in my second-gen Mazda Miata, I closed the centre console lid on a piece of cardstock by accident and it snapped the plastic piece that latches the lid shut. The part previously sold for ~$10 but they stopped producing it as a standalone part at some point and the only way to acquire it was to buy the $100 centre console lid assembly.
Software 100% needs to be included in support.
Old devices that become vulnerable but still accessible on the internet, eventually become part of bot nets producing DDOS and other network attacks.
This isn’t spare parts. This is asking for a new part to be designed and manufactured to replace an existing part. That takes time and money. Granted software doesn’t require mass production, but creating the initial version does take expertise and resources that may no longer exist in addition to the time and money.
You think spare parts don’t cost money? Wearhouse space is expensive. Massive part stores have to be made. That’s all expense needed to take on by auto manufacturers. Why would software be different?
Either that or they keep all the tooling, which again is expensive. And people need to know how to use the tooling too.
This isn’t a “it’d be nice” kind of patch. This is exactly how we get massive bot nets for DDOS attacks. Devices become vulnerable, scans go out on the internet looking for devices they can exploit, and when they do, they gather bot nets.
It’s also not creating something new. It’s fixing your shit. They don’t have to create the entire software stack from scratch, just fix the exploit. If they can’t reasonably do that, then these devices need to be taken offline.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t fix the issue necessarily, assuming it’s even possible. I’m saying they shouldn’t be held to higher standards than any other product just because the engineering effort involved in software is undervalued compared to physical objects. If a product made 15 years ago didn’t follow modern safety standards and is no longer being sold by the manufacturer, we don’t make them update their old products.
As for tooling, yes, and with software it often requires “tooling” that no longer exists in order to develop the patch including hardware that may no longer be manufactured. It’s not like the product manufacturer manufactures all of the parts like circuits and microchips. Just like vacuum manufacturers don’t usually make the bearings and gears and such, they just assemble them. So same concept.
We may require them to keep parts with the existing design, but we don’t require them to fix safety issues that were not found to be out of compliance when it was originally approved for production. We might make them fix it if they’re still selling them, but we don’t make them fix these issues if they are not.
We do take cars that fail safety inspections off the road. You are correct, we don’t hold them to higher standards, but that’s not a reason why we also shouldn’t remove genuine hazards off the roads.
If a car is far more likely to kill someone, it shouldn’t be on public roads either. Just like devices that can’t be update don’t belong on public nets. The risk to the broader public is to big IMO.
Those are things that get inspected regularly because of public safety issues, not ownership issues, and in the US at least, that only happens in a subset of states anyway. That is about using something you know will likely hurt someone vs using something you know will hurt you and possibly your customers. There’s a big difference in liability there.
Vacuums for example do not get regular inspections, and owners are allowed to use any product they want, even defective ones, in their own home or business, even if they pose, say, an electrical shock risk or something else that wasn’t something that would have made it fail its initial certification. We don’t force vacuum manufacturers to fix old product design issues.
And even if we did, how long back would we make them fix? Would 100 year old vacuums need to be brought up to modern safety standards like grounded plugs and all of the wiring to be redone to ground all the parts or more modern motors that use less power so they don’t need to be grounded? What if only one person in the whole world still uses that product?
It’s just not a reasonable thing to expect re-engineering old devices when a new potential owner safety issue is found.
The risk of taking down large portions of the internet has the same risks as a vacuum? Interesting.
Your right not every device has parts availability. But again, why not? Because it it’ll cost more?
Your willing to risk tanking the digital economy for what has historically been huge sums of money, because we don’t hold vacuum cleaners to higher standards?
I’m being obtuse, but you keep pointing to “well we don’t fix that problem over there, so we shouldn’t do it over here”. It doesn’t sway me. We should absolutely fix repability of ALL ELECRONTICS AND CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Someone can generally make 3rd party fixes for hardware flaws of discontinued products without the same kinds of threats software gets. Like replacement antennas or vaccuum bags.
Compiled software can’t be legally decompiled for use in distributing software fixes.
What you’re saying is perfectly reasonable, but also doesn’t apply here because they’re still selling this router new on the D-link Amazon store.
If you’re going to stop supporting a product, you should also stop selling it.
As far as I can tell, those aren’t from authorized resellers or even from Amazon itself which they might have some ability to stop selling them. These are just people who are using amazon marketplace to sell off old stock like any other product. D-link hasn’t sold them for a while. But I could be wrong, I just haven’t seen any evidence that they are selling them. If Bissel had a vacuum that had a faulty gear that would break after a few years of use and they stopped making them, that wouldn’t stop someone from buying them up from Walmart or other store warehouses that no longer sold them and listing them for sale on Amazon or Walmart or whatever marketplace. That’s very common.
Some of them are being sold on the official D-link store on Amazon.
This is a misunderstanding of how Amazon works. There’s a difference from them showing up as products on their “store” and them actually selling them.
Anything that was a product of that company will show if you go to their store and search for it. But if you look at the options for actually buying them you’ll see that they are being sold by third parties.
For example, if you go to this link https://a.co/d/eFXaSFJ for the DSR-150 you’ll see that there are only 3 sellers. The new is shipped and sold by HOLLITRONIC and the others are used and shipped and sold by other sellers. None of the products on the list, as far as I could find, were being sold by D-link or Amazon itself. D-link has no control over the Amazon marketplace and honesty Amazon doesn’t do much to control it even.
I mean, some of those EOLed nearly a decade ago.
You can argue over what a reasonable EOL is, but all hardware is going to EOL at some point, and at that point, it isn’t going to keep getting updates.
Throw enough money at a vendor, and I’m sure that you can get extended support contracts that will keep it going for however long people are willing to keep chucking money at a vendor – some businesses pay for support on truly ancient hardware – but this is a consumer broadband router. It’s unlikely to make a lot of sense to do so on this – the hardware isn’t worth much, nor is it going to be terribly expensive to replace, and especially if you’re using the wireless functionality, you probably want newer WiFi standards anyway.
I do think that there’s maybe a good argument that EOLing hardware should be handled in a better way. Like, maybe hardware should ship with an EOL sticker, so that someone can glance at hardware and see if it’s “expired”. Or maybe network hardware should have some sort of way of reporting EOL in response to a network query, so that someone can audit a network for EOLed hardware.
But EOLing hardware is gonna happen.
I can still use a 2003 AMD Opteron with the newest builds of Linux. It’s an open standard. As long as the hardware still physically works. The only reason these pieces of hardware are EOL is because they chose to lock them down.
This is the correct reaction to old home equipment.
Right?
Something this old is going to be power inefficient compared to newer stuff, and simply not perform as well.
I would know, I just booted up a 10 year old consumer router last night, because the current one died. It’ll be OK for a few days until I can get a replacement. Boy, is this thing slow.
I have a netgear router that isn’t even that old and it doesn’t have gigabit ports.
even though I was able to throw openwrt on there to mess around with it’s still e-waste
e-waste? a lot of networks dont need anywhere near gigabit. Especially because at a lot of places around the world even the ISP can’t provide that bandwidth for internet, but this applies to internal networks too. in a lot of cases a 100 mbps capable managed switch (which a router can be, even if with limitations) is enough
My cat likes how much heat they make too.
all hardware is going to EOL at some point, and at that point, it isn’t going to keep getting updates
EOLing hardware should be handled in a better way
Both of these are solved by one thing: open platforms. If I can flash OpenWRT on to an older router then it becomes useful again.
Definitely don’t this in the past (Linksys WRT54G!) but let’s be honest, the kind of people running 10yo Dlink routers aren’t going to flash new firmware, let alone OpenWRT or even know to look for it. It would have to come that way from the factory. And even then I doubt most people even do regular updates, sadly.
Counter point: so it should automatically update every night when updates are available, and should have or migrate to an open standard at mfg EoL or from the factory.
It’s still the mfg fault, full stop.
If I can flash OpenWRT on to an older router then it becomes useful again.
well, only if it has more than 4 MB storage, 8 MB RAM. I’m practically swimming in older routers that can’t even pass that requirement, and even today the cheaper, that is, more affordable options are still near that for some fucking reason.
Bingo.
Either support the device until the heat death of the universe, or provide consumers with the access to maintain it themselves.
But neither of those help corporations make them all the money. So we need regulation to force them to.
Regulation? I think you mean “guillotines”…
Regulation guillotines maybe?
my guillotine is named regulation
When the users are in control of the software running on their devices then “EOL” is dependent the user community’s willingness to work on it themselves.
I think there should be a handoff procedure, or whatever you want to call it.
As EOL approaches, work with whatever open router OS maker is available (currently OpenWRT) to make sure it’s supported, and configs migrate over nicely. Then drop one last update, designed to do a full OS replacement.
Boom, handoff complete.
I’d support a regulation that defines either an expiration date or commitment to open source at the time the hardware is sold.
The ones with EOL 2015, fair play. But May 2024 isn’t all that long ago.
Edit: Looks like those were launched in early 2015. I guess requesting users to update devices after 8+ years might not be too far fetched.
EoL of anything should mean open source code. You don’t want to open source your code? Then you must keep servicing your products and must keep your servers up
EU is cooking something with EU Directive on Liability for Defective Products. I’ve read only part of it, but basically companies are liable for bugs in software unless they opensource it.
No mercy from Low Level.
I watched and enjoyed that one yesterday, and he’s bang on the money. People here are saying “well it’s EoL” but that means it’s got all the way through development and its full lifetime with such a prominent set of bugs.
I don’t think I’ll be buying D-Link if that’s what supported means.
but does it run openwrt?
e: no it doesn’t, only one model had half-baked image made and available for download from some sketchy forum post made in 2014
Same website (granted, different author, but), same inflammatory language, same vendor, referencing previous erroneous article…I’m not even gonna read this one. Just going to copy/paste my previous response from the previous post:
At a certain point it’s the consumer’s (and blog writer’s) fault, and that’s after EoL. Not patching a supported one and just getting rid of support, saying buy a newer one? Yeah, that’s bad.
Continuing to not support an EoL model that you already don’t support due to EoL (or even dropping support for an EoL model that no one expected you to support in the first place due to EoL)? Non-issue.
Long ago, D-Link was good but then they sold the company. Just like Alienware, Farbreware, Oaklies, etc.
Oakley, like the sunglasses company? What happened to them?
RubberElectrons beat me to it, but EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut, and Target Optical are all the same company, Luxottica.
Glasses from Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue, and Versace, are all from the same company, Luxottica.
Luxottica. I’ve visited their HQ in soCal, people aren’t having fun and coming up with wacky designs anymore.
I agree. Buy a new router that isn’t Dlink.
Yeah after gettin screwed by the DLink you might as well use the TP-Link
A bunch of juvenile D-Linkuents. Get it? D-Link? Nevermind…
Commodity hardware & open source software for the win.
When my Western Digital NAS was never going to get critical security patches, I was so freaking glad to find out that they just used software raid… I threw the HDDs in a Debian server and never looked back.
It’s certainly nice to have things that are turn-key, but if you can find your way around any OS, just avoid proprietary everything.
Is DDWRT still a thing?
OpenWRT is. Not sure if it’s supported on that hardware tho.
Perfect time for users to buy something that isn’t D-Link then innit.
then what? the brand thats owned by a chinese company, and even designs not just the software but the hardware too according to Chinese interests, tp-link?
or the one that requires online registration to access the setup page (and so to replace the firmware) that is netgear?what?
the question was what else to buy, because the alternatives I know are not exactly better…
It baffles my mind how people have picked up a cheap knockoff manufacturer and forcibly made it into a major brand… That still produces junk at same 5 dollar knockoff quality level it had from the start.
I’m confused which brands you speak of, Asus used to be very good
