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[lgfrog]

Please bear with me, as I am by no means a networking expert.  Just the unlucky person at the office who was tasked to find a solution to our problem.

We are a small office with cable internet and a DIR-655 router (HW = A3, FW 1.11), which then goes to a 24-port switch.  We have about 10 PCs in the office that are connected via the switch.  Then we have 2 people using the wireless connection (but they are only in the office 2 days a week).  Our server runs Windows 2003 Small Business Server with a domain set up (roaming profiles also).  Of the 10 "wired" PCs, 7 run Windows XP Pro.  The other 3 run Windows Vista Business or Ultimate.  My PC (XP Pro) has an IP address assigned, but the rest are dynamic.

Previously, we had a Linksys router (BEFSR81) and everything ran fine but we upgraded to the DIR-655 a month ago.  Now we are consistantly having issues.  The wireless connection was dropping every 5 minutes and restarting right away.  We had problems with people FTPing files to us but after reading in one of the forums here about Disabling SPI and changing the endpoint filtering to "Endpoint Independent", that seems to be resolved.

The problem that is most frustrating is that the Vista PCs seem to lose connection to our server at least once a day.  The user will be working along all day, log off (not shutdown) and then when they log in in the morning and try to get to anything on the server, the connection is lost and they have to restart their PC.  The XP Pro users do not have this issue at all.

Our router has DHCP Server enabled, and a range of 200 IP addresses defined.  I saw the setting for DHCP Lease Time - which is set to 1440 minutes, but I do not understand this stuff enough to risk changing anything myself.  Would that setting be something that only the Vista PCs is using?  This router has WAY more settings than the other one did and I am clueless as to what needs to be changed.  One person said that Vista was losing connection with the server because Vista cannot handle being on a Windows server domain.  But I am not sure that is the problem...since we didn't have this issue when using the Linksys router. The new router is the only thing that has really changed. 

I took screen shots of our router settings, both as they were in the Linksys router and as they are now with the DIR-655.  If there is anyone here that can help or at least point me in the right direction, I'd greatly appreciate it!  I could send the screen shots if that would help.

Thanks!

[bananaman]

If it was working with the Linksys, I would stick with it and return the DIR-655 to where you bought it.

I wouldn't swap out a working router just because someone said it was more for home use. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

BTW the DIR-655 is also intended for home use. D-Link has a different product line for business use.

Previously, we had a Linksys router (BEFSR81) and everything ran fine.  But we were told when we upgraded to the 24-port switch that the Linksys router was more for home use, not business, so we upgraded to the DIR-655 a month ago.

[dcfly]

Vista Business and Ultimate have no problem joining a domain.

Do the users get any error messages when they try to access their files on the server? If so, what are they?

Are the Vista machines joined to the domain? Are the users logging-in to their domain accounts?