Hello, first post:
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to configure a wifi extender with DD-WRT.
I have 2 wireless routers (An ASUS RT-AC68U Wireless AC [Stock Firmware] and a Linksys E2000 Wireless N [DD-WRT] ). The ASUS replaced the Linksys and wasn't being used for several months so I thought, "Hey, why don't I flash my Linksys with DD-WRT and configure it as a Repeater Bridge?". I flashed the Linksys router successfully but life has been everything but success since then.
My dream would be for the Linksys to be on the other side of the house, where I already have Ethernet (which connects back to the ASUS router via cabling), and have the Linksys router extend my network, preferably using the Ethernet it already has access to. Research into this topic yields only information that pertains to a wireless link. I have a wired link that I would like to use, is this possible?
I finally settled upon this topic on the DD-WRT Wiki [link to topic] which seemed like it would work. I followed all the instructions and nothing happened. I could either connect to the Linksys router (the extender) and have access to its 192.168.1.2 but no internet, or the ASUS router (the main AP) and have access to its 192.168.1.1 and internet. I even troubleshooted a bit before I gave up, reset the Linksys to factory default, and put it away again.
Again, is this even possible???
I would prefer not to have 2 separate network SSIDs, maybe this goal is just a dream for consumer-grade hardware...
If you want to do it using a wired connection between the two routers the it's really easy. All you have to do is wire them together and set the wireless on both of them with the same SSID name, same encryption mode and same password. Then it will just work, your devices will see just one wireless network with that name and connect to the one with the strongest signal.
Some things to remember: Make sure you disable DHCP on the second router, you only want one DHCP server on your network. If you have two going then when a device joins your network it will ask the DHCP server for an IP address, if it gets it from your main DHCP server then everything is fine, it can get on the internet and whatnot. But if it gets it from another DHCP server then it doesn't get the address of the internet gateway and thus you can't connect to the internet.
Another thing to think about is what channels you use. Ideally you would have each router using a different channel, this way they won't be sharing wireless bandwidth. But if other people are using the other channels then it might be better to use the same channel on both. But you can play around with this until you get the best results. You should only use channels 1, 6 and 11 however as these three don't overlap and thus don't interfere with each other. If you were to use channel 6 and 7 for example then this would cause interference which would slow down the network, if you used 6 for both or you and a neighbour both used 6 then you would be sharing the bandwidth, but the two networks won't be interfering which each other and if you use 1 and 6 then both networks will have their own bandwidth and won't cause any interference with each other.
That makes sense thank you.
Alright I configured as you said, made sure that the router IPs were different (and are not in the DHCP table) but it's still not working. The computers are not receiving IPs on the extended network (all computers connected to the main router are fine)
Here is an example of ipconfig on a client.
Never mind I figured it out (I had the Ethernet in the WAN port). Thank You Dexter Kane for your assistance this has been a learning experience for me.