Sunday, January 15, 2006

Connecting WRT54G router to another Router Wirelessly

As I posted before, I was unable to make my Linksys WRT54G router to connect to another wifi router (NETGEAR WG11) wirelessly, eventhough I downloaded a firmware that was supposed to support WDS. Yesterday, I tried again after reading an article at AnandTech: HOWTO: Use Linksys WRT54G as a Wireless Ethernet Bridge.

I downloaded all of the firmwares on www.dd-wrt.com, but only one firmware I tried, as the documentation told me to try the generic version first. After resetting my router, I saw the web menus of the router changed totally. There are more options/features available, but I was just concentrating on how to make my Linksys router could communicate and act as a bridge to my NETGEAR router as the Internet Gateway router.

I disabled all security settings, make ESSID and channels on both routers the same and then add MAC address of Linksys router in the NETGEAR's Allowed Address List. After that, I selected AP on Linksys. I checked the status, but still Linksys showed the signal is 0 dBm. After disabled security, surprisingly, after I check network status on the Linksys, it showed there was some signal. Cool, I said. But, still it did not get any IP address from NETGEAR.

I then bravely select "client-bridged", and it worked now! But I still don't know how to connect to my Linksys router, because it is now acting as a bridge and there is no IP assigned it. It is acting as a transparent bridge (connecting to NETGEAR wirelessly), and my other PC connected to the Linksys got assigned IP address from the NETGEAR.

Anyway, I am now happy because I can now used it to bridge other PCs which do not have wireless cards and the location inhibit them to connect to the Internet router by wire. I still don't know whether this wireless bridge really works as a bridge (able to connect more than one wired PCs to other PCs connected to another router) or just acts as a 'extender'. Will post again later after I've found out.

3 comments:

  1. I played with this a while ago. If you want to connect two wireless routers to each other and also use both as access points, you should define a new SSID on second router. So with router2 you connect to router1 via SSID1 and you define SSID2 on router2 (it must have other name than router1). Now you can use both cable and wireless connections.

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