Wireless N Repeater help

Hello everybody.

First time poster, but I've been lurking around for about a year just trying to learn a little bit more about how to network my house. Anyways, just moved into a new house, and we're trying out some new technology and it's not quite working as well as it should, so I'm hoping some one here can help me out.

First off, the equipment being used:

Pretty solid router.

Heres the setup I'm trying to do.

Downstairs is the cable modem attached to one of the N-Routers. This outputs a wireless signal that can be used all through the house with no real problems, and a couple of ethernet cables are plugged into it.

Now the other routers come into play. We have 5 people in the house, and we all have computers and love xbox-live, so 4 ethernet ports on the downstairs router won't cut it. So we want to link the other routers up to give us more ethernet ports. Problem is, I don't want cables running from the upstairs to downstairs of the house, and drilling a hole is not an option, the landlord said no. So I am trying to WIRELESSLY link up these routers. So the router upstairs will wirelessly communicate with the one downstairs, giving upstairs 4 free ethernet ports to hook up xboxes, computers etc to it.

The routers we got have a very nifty wireless repeating/base station function. Plug in the MAC addresses and you're good to go. So we did that, and it worked great... for the most part. Heres where I need help.

Soon after installing our network, nieghbors started leeching it (WPA and WEP security didn't work for some reason, it messed with the routers communicating with themselves) So I put on a MAC filter, only allowing our computers to wirelessly connect, and putting the other routers MAC in so they could talk to eachother too.

So that worked for a little bit, but now it's just terrible. The repeaters only work 40% of the time, and always seem to cut out after 15 minutes, then you have to unplug and plug them back in.

So my question to you, is what settings should I use? Originally I only used the repeater and base function, seemed to work out fine. But other people were leeching our net, so I ended up fiddling with some settings, probably made it worse. More questions on settings: Should I have DHCP on or off on the repeaters? What IP address should the DHCP range be? What IP addresses should I assign to the 2 slave/repeaters?

An option could be to turn off the wireless signal on the slaves so it doesn't broadcast, and the downstairs signal is strong enough to get it anywhere in the house. By doing that, I'd only have to control wireless access from one point. Does that make a difference?

Right now my settings are: Main router: IP 192.168.1.1 DHCP range :.2-.40 SSID on MAC Access control on for all wireless connections.

The other routers have the exact same settings, but instead thier IP address are 192.168.1.50 and 192.168.1.75, respectively. they have the same Subnet mask, and their gateway is 192.168.1.1.

Thanks for any help you can give!

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