D-Link DIR-300/600 tips and tricks

Upgrading a DIR-300 B5 to a DIR-600 B5

DIR-300 B5 and DIR-600 B5 have the same hardware. This means that a DIR-300 B5 can be flashed with the firmware for DIR-600 B5 and gain support for 802.11n.

In order to flash a DIR-300 B5 with the firmware for DIR-600 B5, the DIR-300 must be booted in emergency mode: disconnect the power supply from the router and hold reset while reconnecting the power supply. After boot, a web page will be accessible on 192.168.0.1 on any of the router ports. This web page allows uploading of any firmware.

Hidden configuration pages

On both DIR-300 and DIR-600 there exist at least two hidden web pages which exposes a couple of extra settings:

Extracting plain text XML from config.bin

The file config.bin which is downloaded using Save Settings To Local Hard Drive contains a gzipped XML configuration starting at byte 0x68.

dd if=config.bin bs=1 skip=104 | zcat > config.xml