[GTALUG] Second router as wireless ethernet bridge

Lennart Sorensen lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Thu Jan 8 15:28:06 UTC 2015


On Wed, Jan 07, 2015 at 07:10:09PM -0500, Thomas Milne wrote:
> Here's another project I'm working on that is driving me around the bend.
> 
> Sorry this is such a long story...
> 
> A computer in our basement has no wireless, so instead of running a
> long cable to it, I wanted to put a router beside it and have it
> connect to that router by ethernet, and then have that router connect
> to the main one over wireless. No, I did not plug the computer into
> the WAN port... ;-)
> 
> I have an old Linksys router WRT54GL v. 1.1 running Tomato 1.28, and
> my main router, the Buffalo N600 which has DD-WRT.
> 
> According to about a hundred different howto's it should be very simple.
> 
> I set the second router to an IP outside the DHCP range of the first,
> and set also set it to use the first router as gateway and DNS. I also
> set the SSID and password the same, and also the type of security
> used. Oh, and obviously I set the second router as 'Wireless Ethernet
> Bridge'.
> 
> router 1 is 192.168.11.1, router 2 is 192.168.11.2
> 
> both have 255.255.255.0 as subnet mask
> 
> Router 1 gives out addresses starting at 192.168.11.5
> 
> Am I correct in assuming that DHCP broadcasts should be relayed by the
> second router? In wireless bridge mode it doesn't appear to even have
> the option of offering DHCP...
> 
> I noticed that the Buffalo will let you set up a virtual interface, so
> I tried using that with no security at all.
> 
> I also found something here:
> 
> http://www.cnet.com/how-to/reuse-an-old-router-to-bridge-devices-to-your-wireless-network/
> 
> that said I should set the second router to operate as a router and
> not as a gateway so I changed that.
> 
> Still no ping response from google.com :-\
> 
> The only thing I can think of is that maybe the firewall settings are
> wrong on the second router, running Tomato.
> 
> Respond to ICMP is unchecked, Allow Multicast is unchecked, NAT
> Loopback is set to Forwarded Only, and Enable SYN cookies is
> unchecked.

If you set the second router into wireless ethernet bridge mode (not
wireless client mode), then dhcp requests should just pass through to the
dhcp server on the main router that is the wifi access point.

The second router should not have any firewall or anything like that
enabled.  It is purely a wired to wireless ethernet bridge and should
not be getting involved in the actual packets anymore.

-- 
Len Sorensen


More information about the talk mailing list