I moved into a new place and am not able to run Ethernet through walls or floors to where the router is. I have a few systems that I want on the network but none have wifi, only ethernet. Is there a way to connect these systems to a router via wire and then that router connects to the primary router via wifi to complete the connection?
I have done some research and found a feature called client mode but am not sure if this is typically a consumer level thing or not?
Does the router supprt OpenWRT?
The router that I want to connect these devices to has not been purchased yet, I wanted to be sure I got the right functionality. The primary router that it is going to connect to via WIFI is a Verizon one, so I cannot mess with it much.
If you don’t mind having double NAT, you can get a mesh router system from Linksys or TP-Link, I installed one on my parents house, they all work wirelessly and distribute the signal pretty well. However, the node with least latency is the main one in the Living Room
There is also ethernet over power lines! Haven’t dealt with them personally so I can’t say how well they work but it might be an option for ya!
Edit:
Example:
These ideas all seem like they would work. The only con to the Ethernet over power is that I ideally would like to have multiple computers wired to a wifi point that sends to and from the router. This primarily so I don’t have to buy numerous wifi adapters as needed.
I’m sure a solution exists, in my mind it should be as simple as plug four Ethernet wires from computers into a router and then just make that router receive an Internet connection from the primary host router. WRT may be the way to do that
i know for a fact OpenWRT officially supports the exact behavior you desire here. as for shopping for hardware compatibility, that’d be something to ask over on the OpenWRT forums.
Asus home routers support this for sure, and I’m sure others do as well. On the Asus it is called Media Bridge mode.
You’ll want to set a static IP on the media bridge, and make sure your current dhcp server doesn’t hand the IP out.
If your current wifi router/ AP allows you to create more than one wifi (ssid) then I highly recomend making a 5Ghz network that only the media bridge connects to. That way you can make sure it doesn’t jump over to a 2.4ghz radio later.
My setup is:
1x home router acts as wired router/dhcp server.
Aruba AP connected to it with 1gig link and POE injector.
-multiple SSIDs for family, guests, and dedicated SSID for media bridge.
Media bridge connects to 5Ghz wifi network and gives me four, switched, gig ports in my office.
Edit: My media bridge is an old Asus 1900p (best buy version of rt-68u) that I got on craigslist for $50 years ago. I’d recomend something a bit newer since they just stopped updates for it.
Yes, “client mode” basically is what you want - to join the Wifi network and bridge it to the built in ethernet switch on the device. You can hang other switches off the first one as-needed too. OpenWRT does this for sure, so do some other router firmwares but it’s not a super common feature.
You might also see devices marketed as “wifi to ethernet adapter/bridge”
These guys sell hardware with first-party support for OpenWRT which meets your needs and supports many other advanced scenarios as you might need/want in the future like VLANs, etc.
Or, if you’re feeling tinkery, you can buy older wifi routers very cheap from used marketplaces and flash OpenWRT on them yourself.
Rather than client mode you want WDS which is much less hassle however all devices needs to support it.
Does media bridge mode require both routers to be Asus with that feature?
WiFi bridge requires the hardware to support. Last time I looked into it, most hardware on the market doesn’t support that.
You probably need to do double NAT.
BTW, WiFi technology is pretty good nowadays. Converting everything to WiFi may not be a bad choice.
Using a wireless router/mesh unit/AP as a connection point back to the main router will have a lot of drawbacks. That Verizon router probably doesnt also support any special features, and you would have to basically connect a device like an extender/bridge mode to it that has ethernet plugs on the extender that come out. I really dont think you will have any reliable way to do what you are hoping with buying another consumer router to try and get back over your existing wifi.
Wired is obviously best, though if you are sure you cant run an ethernet cable then you only have 1 really reliable option which is MoCA. Powerline is usually very slow, and depending on how bad your wires are and what circuits you are on it can have a lot of disconnect problems as well. Powerline does not go through GFCI circuit breakers properly or GFCI outlets, and just like wifi when it is advertised as “2000 megabit” you actually get 500 in the real world when it works.
So if you have a coaxial connection in both rooms then you can use a MoCA adapter which are pretty reliable and high speed. Many houses and apartments have coax in various rooms so this has a good chance of being an option, and is even compatible with having cable ISP already on the lines since they use different MHz spectrum.
A powerline or MoCA plug can plug into a switch that you then plug as may things into as you want. You can even put a wireless access point onto that switch to provide wifi from that location as well.
Some wifi-access-point that supports bridge- or client mode.
This:
I have done this with Mikrotik-APs in the past, depending on how many devices you need to talk to each other over cable, L009 may fit.
Depends what is the performance you’re looking for. I used a Raspberry Pi 3 with Alpine (diskless install) to connect to wifi (WAN) and act as a router on the ethernet port (with all that entails, like dhcp, dns forwarding etc.). Now my main router is a RockPro64 (doing basically the same).
Both had their ethernet port configured with VLANs, but you can use the port as a single LAN (the classic way).
I’m pretty sure OpenWRT / LibreCMC can do the same, but I never configured them in such a configuration, so do your own research (I’m pretty sure network chuck did a video ages ago on his pi VPN router running openwrt, about a month after my Easy to Follow Roadwarrior multi-client single VPN setup). So technically speaking if a router supports openwrt, it can support wifi WAN and routing the ethernet port as LAN.
My setup allows me to VPN my whole network to outbound in another location, but you don’t have to do the VPN part.
At my old house I had more machines than wifi adapters, but I had a switch. I bridged the connection and allowed the LAN to connect to the internet through the wifi adapter on one machine, but it had to be on to work.
Is it possible to connect one of those powerline ethernet adapters from a switch to the router?
Can you tell me a bit more about alpine? I have some rasp pis and didn’t even think about that as an option
Not much to say. It’s a popular distro for usage inside OCI containers (e.g. docker, podman, k8s), but on low-end hardware, alpine runs very smooth.
It’s primarily a security-focused distro, but because it’s small and uses smaller tools, which besides its lower attack surface, it makes it really lean and mean. It also has some nice bonus features, like diskless install (which I mentioned earlier) which makes alpine load itself into a tmpfs (i.e. run from RAM), so it saves your microSD from 
-ing itself. To make your system state configuration persistent, you need to run the lbu command (I think it was lbu commit), which makes a tar that gets extracted to that tmpfs on boot. You need to configure what files get saved in the lbu.conf (like etc, home, var etc.)
It also has alpinewall (awall) as the firewall, which uses iptables. If you’re familiar with iptables, you can use that directly, otherwise, you can use awall.
As for my experience with it, it was good. I ran it 24/7, but sometimes (because of an already crappy SD card) it failed to boot, so I had to reinstall it. I don’t remember if you can host your diskless system state on NFS and grab it from there, but if you can, I’d do that. Otherwise, you could probably stick it on a USB stick, which has just a little bit more endurance than some cheap microSD cards (the OS files can happily live on the SD, but keep your lbu tar files somewhere else).
Its main repo has everything you need and if there’s something you can’t find in it, just enable the community repo in the apk conf (not to be confused with android’s apk, in this context, it’s alpine package manager).
You can use vanilla Raspberry PI OS to do that. All Linux can be a router with some configuration.
No it does not require that the wifi network be on another Asus router. I have my old Asus router in bridge mode connected to wifi from my Aruba access-point.