Customer Rating: 
Summary: NOT compatible with multifunction printers
Comment: After 3 hours of banging my head against a wall I finally called Tech Support. They finally figured out that this is not compatible with multi-function computers. You can learn that on their support website but no-where in the standard documentation that comes with it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Solid Little USB Print Server
Comment: I too had a little difficulty getting the right IP address of this device so that I could connect to it via my web browser. That was overcome by reading some reviews and the instructions. Amazing huh? hehe.
After getting this thing working, it has been working great and I feel that there is little that needs to be tweaked/modified to make it work just the way you want. Basically you want to share a printer, and that is exactly what this lets you do. I need to upgrade toe 802.11g now though.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid, but tricky to setup
Comment: As several other reviewers have noted, this can be a beast to setup. The difficulty, I found, comes to trying to get the dp-311u to work wirelessly. After 50 minutes of fiddling with it, I started to suspect that it might not be wireless (a mistake several other reviewers shared).
The steps given by s.banks below are better than the lousy manual. But even after following them I had trouble. I eventually found that it was the MAC address security filter on my router that was preventing this thing from working wirelessly. What you have to do is: add the device to the MAC filter list, then disable MAC filtering on the router, unplug the dp-311u, re-enable the MAC filtering, then turn on the 311-u. It then started working wirelessly.
I'm subtracting a star for the majorly painful setup, and another for the very limited printer compatibility list.
Other than that, it seems like a solid product.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works well for only under a year w/ a PC
Comment: I could not for the life of me get this working for a while, but once I did get to the web-configuration I couldn't get it to work with my existing wireless network. Although this was due to my stupidity, the lack of Macintosh documentation and software made it quite difficult to set up on my mac, and I might have been able to get it working sooner if it had this documentation. Finally, about a year after the year-long warrantee expired, it broke. I called customer service, and, despite what other reviewers have said, they were extremely helpful and tried everything within his power to fix my problem. But, the product was indeed broken and now I can't return it because it's beyond warrantee.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great, once you get it working!
Comment: My network is two wireless XP laptops and a Linksys 802.11b router so I was a little worried about mixing networking brands - but it worked out fine. Virtually no slowdown compared to having the printer directly connected to the laptop and I print some pretty big files. Setup wasn't too bad (~15-20 min staring at the manual really confused, 5 min reading amazon.com reviews, ~20-30 min installation). Much like what Hafizullah said, it's better to config in steps: configure the printer in the wired configuration and then get it to work wirelessly. Since the manual is mostly useless, here's what I did:
1. Wire it up (connect the print server to the router with an ethernet cable and the printer to the print server by USB).
2. Turn on printer, power on the print server (after startup sequence of ~20 sec, ethernet light should be lit).
3. At this point open up a browser and go to "192.168.0.10" and the print server config utility should start.
4. Click on the "configuration" tab and set: password, connection mode (mine is infrastructure), ESS-ID (your network's name), wireless channel, WEP (# bits and password). It's important to type the WEP key in exactly with no spaces or dashes because the utility won't give any error message if the password is wrong. Click 'save'.
5. Click on the "Network" tab and change the IP address if you want. It has to be within the range of assignable IP addresses for your wireless network (e.g. my router assigns from 192.169.1.1 to 192.169.1.101, so I set the print server to 192.169.1.2). Make sure to set "manually assign" otherwise you won't know what address your printer is on! I think the workgroup has to be set, but I'm not sure (I set it to the name of the wireless network).. Click 'save'.
6. At this point you should be able to print a test page. Click on the "tools" tab and click to print a test page. If it prints, you're in business.
7. Now you can set up the printer drivers. The instructions are actually pretty good for this, so use them here. Once that's done, try printing something that isn't a test page to make sure the printer itself is set up OK.
8. Now to configure the wireless portion. Unplug the ethernet cable, and click the reset button (recessed in the back of the print server). Once it finishes booting, the "wireless" light should be on or blinking. If so then you should be done. Try printing something.. I didn't have everything correctly set up initially, so this step took a few minutes. I think everything necessary to set was covered in #4.
Good Luck!
Summary: NOT compatible with multifunction printers
Comment: After 3 hours of banging my head against a wall I finally called Tech Support. They finally figured out that this is not compatible with multi-function computers. You can learn that on their support website but no-where in the standard documentation that comes with it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Solid Little USB Print Server
Comment: I too had a little difficulty getting the right IP address of this device so that I could connect to it via my web browser. That was overcome by reading some reviews and the instructions. Amazing huh? hehe.
After getting this thing working, it has been working great and I feel that there is little that needs to be tweaked/modified to make it work just the way you want. Basically you want to share a printer, and that is exactly what this lets you do. I need to upgrade toe 802.11g now though.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid, but tricky to setup
Comment: As several other reviewers have noted, this can be a beast to setup. The difficulty, I found, comes to trying to get the dp-311u to work wirelessly. After 50 minutes of fiddling with it, I started to suspect that it might not be wireless (a mistake several other reviewers shared).
The steps given by s.banks below are better than the lousy manual. But even after following them I had trouble. I eventually found that it was the MAC address security filter on my router that was preventing this thing from working wirelessly. What you have to do is: add the device to the MAC filter list, then disable MAC filtering on the router, unplug the dp-311u, re-enable the MAC filtering, then turn on the 311-u. It then started working wirelessly.
I'm subtracting a star for the majorly painful setup, and another for the very limited printer compatibility list.
Other than that, it seems like a solid product.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Works well for only under a year w/ a PC
Comment: I could not for the life of me get this working for a while, but once I did get to the web-configuration I couldn't get it to work with my existing wireless network. Although this was due to my stupidity, the lack of Macintosh documentation and software made it quite difficult to set up on my mac, and I might have been able to get it working sooner if it had this documentation. Finally, about a year after the year-long warrantee expired, it broke. I called customer service, and, despite what other reviewers have said, they were extremely helpful and tried everything within his power to fix my problem. But, the product was indeed broken and now I can't return it because it's beyond warrantee.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great, once you get it working!
Comment: My network is two wireless XP laptops and a Linksys 802.11b router so I was a little worried about mixing networking brands - but it worked out fine. Virtually no slowdown compared to having the printer directly connected to the laptop and I print some pretty big files. Setup wasn't too bad (~15-20 min staring at the manual really confused, 5 min reading amazon.com reviews, ~20-30 min installation). Much like what Hafizullah said, it's better to config in steps: configure the printer in the wired configuration and then get it to work wirelessly. Since the manual is mostly useless, here's what I did:
1. Wire it up (connect the print server to the router with an ethernet cable and the printer to the print server by USB).
2. Turn on printer, power on the print server (after startup sequence of ~20 sec, ethernet light should be lit).
3. At this point open up a browser and go to "192.168.0.10" and the print server config utility should start.
4. Click on the "configuration" tab and set: password, connection mode (mine is infrastructure), ESS-ID (your network's name), wireless channel, WEP (# bits and password). It's important to type the WEP key in exactly with no spaces or dashes because the utility won't give any error message if the password is wrong. Click 'save'.
5. Click on the "Network" tab and change the IP address if you want. It has to be within the range of assignable IP addresses for your wireless network (e.g. my router assigns from 192.169.1.1 to 192.169.1.101, so I set the print server to 192.169.1.2). Make sure to set "manually assign" otherwise you won't know what address your printer is on! I think the workgroup has to be set, but I'm not sure (I set it to the name of the wireless network).. Click 'save'.
6. At this point you should be able to print a test page. Click on the "tools" tab and click to print a test page. If it prints, you're in business.
7. Now you can set up the printer drivers. The instructions are actually pretty good for this, so use them here. Once that's done, try printing something that isn't a test page to make sure the printer itself is set up OK.
8. Now to configure the wireless portion. Unplug the ethernet cable, and click the reset button (recessed in the back of the print server). Once it finishes booting, the "wireless" light should be on or blinking. If so then you should be done. Try printing something.. I didn't have everything correctly set up initially, so this step took a few minutes. I think everything necessary to set was covered in #4.
Good Luck!
D-Link DP-311U Wireless Print Server, 1-USB Port, 802.11b, 11Mbps Reviews: Page 3 of 6
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