TechGremlin
Update 16th January 2010: 1.33b01NA has been released.
Update 2nd November 2009: All users having issues with SharePort, check out this post for the latest information.
Update: Make sure you read the comments below to find out anything new about this feature, many bugs has been fixed since the original release, as of August 2009 Firmware 1.32NA FINAL is the latest firmware, read about it and download it here.
I have owned a D-Link DIR-655 router for the past year and it is by far the best router that I have ever used, although I did pay $150 more than what I have paid for a router before, so I’ve gotten what I have paid for.
Starting with the version 1.21 Beta 04 of the DIR-655 firmware there is now SharePoint functionality available. SharePoint as the media and other sites partially call it or SharePort as it is called everywhere else including the software itself is a way for D-Link products to share a USB device over the LAN, i’m going to try to not confuse you any further so I will refer to it only as SharePort from now on.
SharePort is an interesting feature that I actually wanted to be able to do a few years ago, by sharing USB devices from a computer so they can be used on another PC as if the device was actually plugged into your PC. D-Link have finally brought this technology to life in a limited fashion with SharePort.
This is how SharePort works, I will use my DIR-655 and Brother DCP-150C MFC as an example.
The DIR-655 has a USB port on the back, tests seem to indicate it is a USB 1.1 port, up until now the port was used for wireless settings that could be stored on a USB key.
After installing the new firmware however the USB port has found more use, we’re greeted with a new menu under Setup that controls the use of the port.
As you can see there is not much to the setup of this USB port, WCN Configuration is the default, this is used for the wireless configuration key, choose the dropdown box:
Choosing Network USB puts the router in SharePort mode, choosing 3G USB Adapter is a bit of a mystery to me, I’m not sure what devices are compatible with this yet, however as most people do, I have a 3G service and using it as a backup by only connecting the device up to the USB port and choosing 3G USB Adapter would be very handy.
Once you have chosen Network USB the device is automatically shared, however in order to connect you must install the SharePort software from D-Link, this is still in Beta it appears so use with caution etc etc, I haven’t had a problem with it yet and it seems fairly polished. once it is installed make sure you allow it to run at startup and run it straight away, otherwise you won’t be able to use the device without manually running the SharePort software each time, it only uses 2MB of ram so it’s not a resource hog.
If your USB device is on and connected then the SharePort utility should display like this once you double click on the icon in the system tray. It will then allow you to run through a wizard for installing the device, you will need your device’s driver cd or the latest driver for their website, at the end you will be asked if you want to automatically connect to the device when you print if it is a printer, this is a good idea otherwise you must manually choose to connect.
Once that is all set up on each computer that uses the device, you will notice that each device states that the printer is paused and offline, print to the printer anyway, the SharePort software detects that a print has been sent to the printer and it automatically assigns the printer to your computer and while the printer is communicating with your PC it will show as connected, once the print job has been finished it will then return back to offline, paused.
The limitation of this feature is that it will only work on one PC at a time, USB devices simply aren’t designed to be connected to 2 PCs at once so it makes sense why this is the case.
I have not tried such things as webcams however they have been known to work, however at a slower rate than normal, the scanner feature of my printer works fine, however you must manually connect using the SharePort software to use it, make sure you disconnect after you are done.
As I stated at the start of this article the SharePort software is something I have been waiting a long time for, it’s a great feature considering my router is not the latest out there now and it almost seemed like D-Link had given up adding new features to it, it also shows how well the device can work if it can handle a USB device while it is performing all it’s other duties.
Dlink released an update to the sharepoint utility software this week. For my wired pc issues it does help, but is not a complete fix.
At start-up my wired pc doesn’t see the printer connected to the shareport. In the 1.0 version, the dialog box for the utility started with “advanced options”. Now it starts with the address for the router.
I can force the utility to see the printer by selecting disable and then enable in that shareport dialog. Still not a complete solution but getting better…
Shareport is not finding my router in the pop up menu from the system tray icon. I have the DIR 655 and a vista x64 OS. Dlink support stated that shareport does not support 64 bit vista OS but posts here seem to contradict that. Any recommendations, advice would be much appreciated.
I installed Shareport 1.14 and it works better, although when I disconnect from a hard drive it says it’s busy and should I force or cancel. Force seems to work and I can re-connect ok
I’ve just upgrade my firmware and everything work’s fine. I’ve test USB HDD and USB Printer both work fine. I’m pleased with DIR-655. Real cool
Finally got second laptop to connect to printer hanging off DIR-855. The cuplrit was OneCare – thanks James 30 December. Once One Care Firewall was disabled my Shareport icon turned green and the printer was able to be used. Only took me a couple of days and many grey hairs !
Hi all,
I setup the DIR-655 for a friend – one older desktop with Windows ME and a new laptop with Vista. The desktop is wired to the router, the laptop is wireless. I installed Shareport and hooked up his printer to the USB on the router. It worked! for a few days. Now the printer seems to have disappeared…. sort of. It’s not listed in any application, but if I click on the Shareport Utility, it says the printer (a fairly new HP) is available. There’s got to be something I’m missing here. Anyone know?
(For now, he’s not trying to print from the desktop, but I was thinking a usb hub would allow me to hook the printer to the desktop as well as the router.)
thanks
Oh well, I went to my friend’s house and everything worked fine… of course! The printer was available and I clicked Connect and it connected. It did reinstall the printer driver. Who knows what he did — he did say he’d been turning. So maybe when I rebooted, it got straightened out.
I am still interested in using a usb hub so his desktop is wired to the printer. So, if anyone has done that and has any “gotchas” to warn me about, I’d appreciate it. I’m thinking printer to hub and hub to desktop and hub to router.
thanks
Just got a DIR-655 last week after all the good reviews. I downloaded the SharePort fw 1.21 (2008/10/09). I’m a bit disappointed with it. Wanted to share some of the issues I’m seeing perhaps you have solutions to share;
– Clients (3x Vista Acers, & XP Pro Lenovo) have hard time getting an IP address with WPA-personal, and WPA2-personal after wake-up. I must have the laptop try few times until it succeeds. They worked quite fine with cheap Belkin 802.11g routers
– Connection drops even though signal is in the 85% or greater most of the time
– Finally, I bought this when I heard about the SharePort fw. This feature was a big disappointment. I thought it may work as a printserver, but clients have to request and grant the connection before use… very stupid when no one is using the already connected client! – Also, if the laptop sleeps, the connection gets stuck and a USB disconnect/re-connect must be done for the printer to be re-discovered. Lastly, my Canon MF MP830 is not happy with it. The print preview doesn’t work anymore, the printer doesn’t wake up on jobs, and the jobs error out frequently.
having the same issue as this guy below is telling every thing is ok but when i click on the utility on task bar nothing flashes on desktop.it work well on my other computer running vista 32 home premium , it was doing good on this system too but i don’t know why it start acting up like this.this is vista 32 ultimate any suggestion guys would be appreciated.
“Author: Pit
Date: Nov 8, 2008
Hi, I have my own DIR655 for 1 week. Its an EU version, but US firmware 1.21 run smothly. Shareport works, but not very stable.
First issue, sharing USB disk drive over the WiFi is not a good idea IMHO. Any network problem and Vista have issues with device. Also performance is an issue (800kB/s when 2M/s when copying files between laptops with WiFi n adapters).
But I purchased this router for printer sharing. And it is possible, but Shareport Utility (1.0) works only on the local account. When working on the active directory account, the utility’s popup window shows the device connected to the router’s USB port. But when clicking on the tray icon the app window is not shown. Application is on the taskbar but has no window to select device and do connect.
On the local account everything is OK. Seems to be the SharePort Utility issue. The OS was installed a week ago, not many aplications installed.
“
forget to tell in above post i m using Dlink-655 with firmware 1.21 (latestone) and share port utility 1.14. hope that u guys will provide some assistance on this issue.
For KingTut: I have a similar problem on my laptop, the problem is caused by the channels the router is using for wireless, sometimes it will get out of range of standard wireless cards, even my laptop’s N card doesn’t work properly sometimes, try forcing the wireless channel to something like channel 6 for a while and see how it goes, you can also try having the channel set to 20Mhz, not 20/40.
For bally: It’s possible SharePort needs certain permissions to run properly, it may be a good idea to get in contact with D-Link so they are aware of this issue, it could be a bug that they are unaware of as of yet.
Just installed the latest firmware for DIR-655 and Shareport on three Vista and three XP Pro SP3 pcs. The vista pc’s are both wired and wireless and works fine. Te XP pc’s refuse to find the router (all three wired). What more is that the Shareport uses up all CPU power when I try to exit the application. There is definitely problems with the software. All firewalls have been turned off. The XP machines have different Anti virus (AVG, Avast and Norman). One of the XP PC’s are connected directly to the router, two through a access point. Changing channels or stopping other applications using communication ports have no effect. The Shareport has been tested 0.94 and also updated to 1.0 and tested with clean installations. If anyone is able to run Shareport on XP, please explain how it was installed. Also try Exiting the application and check the CPU meeter.
dlink support q-less regarding active directory matter. even no reply for 4 days upto now. WTF Support they r providing . just dont even know what the thing is
Just wondering out loud: do you think that it would be possible to use DIR-655´s USB port for something else then sharing a printer?
It certainly doesn´t sound to be good enough for usb-hdd´s for very low transfer speeds that´s been mentioned over here.
Could it be used for hosting a very small web server from an USB stick, like a static home page?
I have the same problem after install all my laptops, Vista and XP starts to crash and no one could reach the printer plugged in the USB port….
I think i have a different problem here.. i connected a usb hard disk on the usb port of my dir-655 (1.21 firmware) and installed the shareport utility on my vista32 and xp sp3 computers.. I get no router name when i right click the utility in the system tray so I can’t select any usb device from the router.. By double clicking the utility, i get no detected usb device in the utiliy’s panel either.. I even tried without wirewall, to no avaqil.. what’s up with this?
..also, whenever i boot vista32 i get a ‘new hardware found’ message and the request to install drivers for the router.. except that there are no drivers in the cd that came with it or on dlink’s website… any suggestions? (by the way, the router works, as I can connect wireless and share my internet connection..)
For Stefano:
Try downloading/installing SharePort again, the drivers are a combination of generic drivers that Windows should already have and 1 or 2 that should be installed with that setup program.
Looks like the program has installed but has been unsuccessful in installing the drivers for some reason, it is most likely that the setup program has exited and deleted the required driver files in the temporary directory before it has had a chance to install them.
Have you V-Lited or stripped down your Windows XP cds in any way? Sometimes removing inbuilt drivers stops less common drivers that some hardware needs.
For Gustavo:
Unfortunately this software and the drivers don’t play well with other software and drivers and there is so many possible incompatabilities, it crashes many computers with seemingly no reason.
If there is any software that is installed on those Laptops however unconnected they may seem to the problem, try removing them temporarily.
For Mika:
I don’t think there’s much chance of that being possible until they create some sort of interface that allows the router to use the stick for storage so it can run an additional server, then I think the router may not have the processing power needed for such a task.
For Bally:
This would be more of an additional feature in D-Link’s eyes, they would have no obligation to get it working correctly, it’s just the way those companies work, they don’t get much more money on additional functionality such as this so it’s not really worth their time.
For GC:
I’ve never experienced cpu usage issues at any time with SharePort on XP or vista, using different virus scanners or wireless/wired, or even through another access point, I actually have the program set to not startup as it has all sorts of problems when it’s allowed to run all the time.
My installation was fairly straight forward so it probably won’t help you much, double clicked on the install file, installed with default options and when it was done restarted.
FOR ALL:
I had problems with the program telling me the usb device was connected, then not every 10 minutes or so, then when attempting to use it it would disconnect each time, seems that the router no longer liked my usb extension cable, so I removed it and all is good now, so try changing usb cables when things don’t work out properly.
for Ben.
Thanks for the answer… my xp install is fairly clean, so i don’t think it has any problems.. also, i didn’t detect any problems while installing the shareport utility in both computers, so i find it hard to believe it’s a bad installation.. i’m clueless..
Hi Ben, what version is your router? AU or US? Have you tried 3G USB modem on your router?