Where is Netgear Downloader in Netgear JNR 3210 Wifi Router??

Netgear JNR3210

I bought Netgear JNR 3210 couple of months back as I wanted to a Gigabit switch and a wifi router. This one was the cheapest mere Rs. 2950/- (in India) and it served me both the purpose.

This one has a lot of good features like USB port (allowing attaching usb drives/printer which shares this across the network, DLNA/uPnP media share (allowing client to connect and have any media get streamed directly by router), etc. Well, consider these features this could easily serve as a NAS and it works like a charm, better than my iOmega Home Media Cloud Edition 2TB drive (which fails intermittently).

This router even has a Netgear Downloader which allows downloading Torrent/files directly by Router on the attached USB drives without the need to keep any PC/Laptop kept on.
But it surprsingly this feature is not there on screen, Netgear sometime back during it firmware upgrade had removed it. Infact this feature was only there when this Router was launched with version 1.1.0.14 (at time of this blog Netgear had released version 1.1.0.27)

I reached Netgear helpline and they really were not even aware that it was been removed from this router, they seems to be still referring the launched version UI and insisted that there is a Netgear Downloader menu on screen which can be clicked and configured to download files.

So googled to find that one other user had complained about this to Netgear and the offical there has mentioned that its been discontinued. Upon deeper investigation I even was more surprised that they even had done some patch for this feature in 1.1.0.25 version. But really where was this.. Netgear seems to have done this with the DLNA as well in past but that feature came back in later versions.

It took me 3 days of dedicated time and fortunately it came up.. I was able to install the 1.1.0.14 version and see that feature working and it was cool and useful. But then I can't keep version 1.1.0.14 a dated version on my router missing some good number of service packs and releases. I jumped back to the latest release. But really why would they give a patch in 1.1.0.25 for this when its been removed... or is it still there??

Well its still there, just that its hidden.. And here is the way to get it..

Login to the router control panel. lets say your router IP is 10.0.0.1 or 192.168.0.1 then login to that as admin


Once logged in.. enter url :

http://10.0.0.1/GD_download_manage.htm&todo=cfg_init
or
http://192.168.0.1/GD_download_manage.htm&todo=cfg_init

Netgear Downloader Screen

and you have it the Downloader is still there but just hidden, they have forgotten to add that menu back. Or may be there is a security issue to this.. But it doesn't seems to be.


So go ahead and use this hidden gem and Enjoy the green technology revolution.. no pcs required to be kept ON whole night to download our torrents.. Only 8watt router and its superb!!