On Netgear WNR2000 Wifi Router (for Linksys ATA and Iomega NAS to work)

It has been almost 6 months since my last post... I believe I have collected sufficient information from using the Netgear WNR2000 wifi router for another post. By the way, this router is 3 years old and was released back in June 2008 (http://routers.productwiki.com/netgear-wnr2000/).

I purchased a Linksys ATA device and in the process of getting it work behind the Netgear router, there were several interesting findings with regards to the port-forwarding settings:

1. Using WNR2000 default settings, the Linksys ATA could only make out-going phone calls. Incoming phone calls resulted in a "person you are trying to call is unavailable..." message, despite successful SIP registration.

2. Netgear WNR2000 port forwarding settings only came into effect AFTER the router rebooted.

3. F.Y.I. I configured static IP address on the Linksys ATA device (which, by the way, only comes into effect after disabling DHCP on Linksys ATA)

The following Port Forwarding rules were referenced from another post, and the rule numbers on WNR2000 MATTERS. Have them configured the other way around and incoming calls would't work.

Rule 1: Permit UDP 5060, Linksys ATA static IP

Rule 2: Permit UDP 16384 - 16482, Linksys ATA static IP

I also own an Iomega NAS (with an Ethernet port). Interesting enough, everytime after I restarted my laptop, the NAS' share drives were no longer visible (The laptop connects to the same Netgear AP which the NAS is also connected to through a CAT5e). Out of interest, Wireshark capture indicated that when Iomega started up, it first multicasts MDNS queries (port 5353 rather than UDP 53 for standard DNS).

This was then followed by exchanging SMB messages (TCP 445) between the laptop and NAS. While I am no expert in SMB, I recall reading messages annoucing each of the shared directories.

As such, it would appear either the NAS stopped annoucing these messages after the TCP connection timed out (due to laptop restart), or the wireless router stopped new TCP sessions from being established.

The only workaround was to restart the wifi router. Afterwards, the NAS shared drives would magically become visible from my laptop again.

P.S. This morning the Netgear router finally gave in after several restarts. Both my laptop and iPhone had difficulty connecting to the AP. As a result, I have replaced this router with a TP-Link TL-WR740. Upgraded this box to the latest firmware and so far so good... the Linksys ATA was a matter of simply plug-and-play while the IP NAS has remained visible so far... perhaps I shall have more to add after another couple of months.

P.P.S. For convenience, the dialplan on the Linksys ATA has been simplified from
# Original dialplan, local calls only

(*xx|[3469]11|0|00|[2-9]xxxxxx|1xxx[2-9]xxxxxxS0|xxxxxxxxxxxx|<#0:>xx.<:@gw0>.)

To
# For dialing everything
(*xx|xxx.)