How do I turn a spare router into a dumb switch

spec sheet:

it looks like it's more than just an unmanaged switch, although it's not as comprehensive as a higher end model.

the 'software' is built in and accessed via a web browser.

"dan" snipped-for-privacy@nospam.com wrote

| Who wouldn't want extended range for free without cost or waste? | And who wouldn't want to save landfills from one more piece of waste? | | My thoughts are that I hate to waste things, and buying a new "anything" is | a tremendous waste for the environment if everyone acted that way. |

That makes sense, *if* it really adds notable usefulness to re-use the old router. I didn't understand that you're going mostly wireless. I had bought a switch for adding more cables and thought that was what you wanted to do. I don't have any experience with wifi extending options because I simply don't use wifi. Sorry to confuse things.

Please do not apologize. I learned a LOT from this thread, and, from that learning, I acquired a healthy APPRECIATION for how powerful routers are!

Even old routers.

I apologize that I started asking only how to turn the old router into a dumb switch but then when I started learning what an old router could do, I "moved the goalposts" to asking how to make it a more useful Repeater Bridge.

It took most of the night last evening to set it up and debug why it wasn't working the way it's documented, but I can simplify the final results that it's WONDERFUL to be able to plug in a Repeater Bridge almost ANYWHERE in your home that has "low signal" strength - and voila - it's fantastic!

No wires!

I put the spare router inside a cabinet in the kitchen powered up. Then I tested it by connecting with phones and laptops in the kitchen.

Instantly I have a VERY STRONG wireless signal strength in that kitchen.

A wonderful versatility is that if I need a VERY STRONG signal somewhere else in the house, or even outside the house (if it's not too far away), I can just pick up that spare router and move it to that location.

Any location that is close enough to receive "some" signal from any access point in the house (notice very clearly I didn't say the home router!), can get instant HIGH SIGNAL strength simply by plopping the spare router there.

That's pretty useful don't you think?

Never apologize for asking and learning.

This is one of the goals of usenet: people helping people.

And it doesn't mean you get the answer you're looking for.

And the discussion refreshes information, explores ideas and takes us down the odd rabbit hole.

Unfortunately a few big egos come along and prance in various ways.

Yes indeed - glad this is working for you. I have a spare WiFi router and now I'm tempted to do similar: I can put it in the attic above the centre of the house. Has to go through the ceiling but that's better than the 2 walls it's penetrating now to get to the kitchen and patio (3 walls). OTOH, it would made wired access to the router not very practical.

Another route would be a (brieflyly exposed) cable through the basement into the crawlspace and up into the LR. Already have some speaker wire on that last segment.

It took many hours last night but I have earned a newly found appreciation for how WONDERFUL having a spare router can be, in that I can plug it in almost anywhere in the house, and I get instant high signal strength there.

All I need is electricity and signal from somewhere (which can be either the home router's access points, or any other access point around my home).

What took the most time this week was mainly in learned enough to DECIDE what to do with the spare router, where I didn't know for the longest time what the difference was between setting up the spare router "Wireless Mode" as an AP, Adhoc, Client, Client Bridge, Repeater or Repeater Bridge.

While I first asked to set it up as a "dumb switch", I soon realized these two were the most versatile options for extending the main router's range.

A Repeater Bridge has the following advantages. [1] It can be placed anywhere there is enough signal from anything [2] That signal can be from the main router or from a nearby access point [3] There's no need for any wires (other than for the power supply)

What you gain with a Repeater Bridge wherever you plop it down, is [1] You gain five Ethernet RJ45 ports for free (one is configurable) [2] You gain a strong access point wherever you plop the Repeater Bridge [3] I can't figure out even a single downside to a Repeater Bridge setup

Can you think of any downside to this approach for everyone to use?

Instead of throwing away this spare router, just by the act of turning it into a Repeater Bridge allows me to plop it anywhere that has any signal from any access point (not just from the main router's access points) and instantly I get strong signal with no wires wherever I place it.

That's really nice! What could be better than that!

I found out that you're right that the DD-WRT software I flashed has an option to turn the now unused WAN RJ45 port into a usable LAN RJ45 port.

Repeater Bridge DD-WRT Setup > Basic Setup > Network Setup > WAN Port > Assign WAN Port to Switch = checkbox

That makes all five ports (4 LAN + 1 WAN) RJ45s into usable LAN ports.

Yesterday I finished setting it up as what DD-WRT calls a Repeater Bridge.

Not only does that "new" Repeater Bridge give me instant strong signal anywhere I plug it in, but it also gives me those five Ethernet ports I had asked for when I first opened this thread.

One of those five Ethernet ports could be useful to plug a pc into if the pc doesn't have a wireless NIC but if it only has an Ethernet NIC instead.

That way the Repeater Bridge also adds Wi-Fi to a pc.

All this is for free. [1] Instant high signal strength for wireless devices like phones & laptops [2] No wires other than the need for the power connection [3] Five Ethernet ports [4] Connects to any access point (not just to the one main home router)

I'm trying to think of a downside to having set up the spare router as a Repeater Bridge, and I just can't think of any. Is there any downside?

Low throughput comes to mind when dealing with repeaters. If you're ok with that, the rest is good.

The last time I tried a repeater experiment, which was also the first time I tried a repeater experiment, the current WiFi protocol was

WiFi has come a long way since then, but repeaters still suck, in my mind, because whatever WiFi protocol your old router supports, you're only likely to see about 35-40% of the theoretical rate. That's too much of a hit for me, so I always look for other options.

Bottom line, your LAN ports may or may not be limited to only 100mbits, but that's probably not the limiting factor. It's probably the WiFi link. Note that signal strength doesn't necessarily correlate to throughput capacity. It's possible to have a very strong signal that's completely unusable.

What I didn't know was how VERSATILE a router is, where, in the end, I got my five Ethernet ports after all.

I can plop it to anywhere inside or out that needs more signal strength. Or that needs Ethernet ports.

All for free.

I watched this great Repeater Bridge setup video but only after I couldn't get the DD-WRT Repeater Bridge to connect to the Internet.

I'm not sure if I needed all three, but only after changing all three did the Internet suddenly show up using the router as a DD-WRT Repeater Bridge.

Portability is the beauty of this Repeater Bridge.

The only requirements I can think of are these as far as I know. [1] You need AC power in your attic [2] You need "some" signal strength from any access point in your LAN [3] Your router has to be a Wi-Fi router that DD-WRT supports

I think you only need to decide between a Client Bridge or Repeater Bridge.

There are even ways to set up the Repeater Bridge in dual band mode.

Cabling is nice. But more physical work.

If you do set up your extra router with DD-WRT as a Repeater Bridge, you'll want to specifically make a decision about these three issues which got me.

DD-WRT Repeater Bridge

DD-WRT Repeater Bridge Setup > Advanced Routing > Operating Mode > "Router" & "Gateway" setting [2] I didn't have Internet until I changed from "Gateway" to "Router"

DD-WRT Repeater Bridge Services > Services Management > DNSMasq > "DNSMasq" & "Local DNS" settings [3] I didn't have Internet until I enabled both of them but the videos say to disable "DNSMasq" but it didn't work for me so maybe it doesn't matter because after I did all three, finally the Internet showed up.

I'm still a noob but if you have questions, feel free to ask for help. A friend said he'd give me an old router so I can try setting up another.

Also for me the last time I tried a repeater experiment (which was also the first time I tried a repeater experiment) the router was the WRT54Gv5.

I think at the time it wouldn't handle wireless repeating so I wired it. That's (I hope) the last time I'll ever crawl around stringing cables!

I do understand that the main downside you're saying is the router is old.

Does this "dual band" DD-WRT "Repeater Bridge" solve the speed problem?

That seems reasonable that the biggest drawback is likely that the speed is probably something less than half of what it would be had it been wired.

That makes a second drawback which is that the ports on an older router are likely to be slower than the ports that might be on a newer router.

So that's two known drawbacks. [1] The speed is less when it's a Repeater Bridge than if it was wired [2] The five Ethernet ports are still slower than the latest in speeds

Thanks!

Thank you for all your help and advice which was instrumental in getting the Repeater Bridge working as a portable hotspot with Ethernet ports.

It seems that's the main drawback which is lower speed because of two things that conspire together, the first being it's an old router after all (so for example, the Ethernet ports are not the fastest speeds) and the Repeater Bridge function itself lowers the throughput.

Two things I briefly tested because I was curious are NEVER shown in any of the descriptions I've seen so far of how Repeater Bridges work are [1] You can connect to any of your LAN access points, not just the router [2] Any client can still connect to the same access point you bridged to

That's kind of neat in that everything that worked for wireless clients (like phones & laptops) before the Repeater Bridge was set up, still works.

I had thought making the router bridge to (let's call it) AccessPoint1, that AccessPoint1 wouldn't be available to other wireless clients at the same time. But it is.

What's even better is that a friend gave me a second (even older) router to play with today and I set it up to connect to the same AccessPoint1.

So, for example, I can bring up BOTH Repeater Bridges on my PC so that I could take screen shots of each page side by side in my web browser to compare the setup differences (they're versions of the DD-WRT software). https://freeimage.host/i/HWGtxCx In one old router, for example, you can see the Repeater Bridge only seemed to have worked when I set "DNSMasq" to Enable & "Local DNS" to Disable.

It doesn't help things that I don't even know what a "DNSMasq" is. :-(

This description says it's just a cache so I don't see why it mattered.

I used an old router as a wifi access point on a different LAN segment. I was having (and I'm still occasionally having) problems accessing a certain website from my Android phone, but only over my VDSL internet connection and not over anyone else's or over my phone's mobile internet connection. Sometimes the network gets into a state where a request for a page on the site times out.

So I wanted to get a Wireshark trace of the conversation. Sadly I fell foul of the router's desire to keep traffic local to one LAN segment. I tried with a Wireshark PC connected to the same wireless access point as the phone, as opposed to PC on an Ethernet port and phone on wifi, but even that didn't see all the traffic for a web-page access. I thought that all devices connected to the same wifi node were regarded as the same "LAN segment" in terms of traffic filtering - evidently not.

So I bought a managed switch which offered port mirroring: one Ethernet port is *defined* to see all the traffic on another port. Not having a wireless access point, I connected an old router (with NAT turned off) to the port that was being mirrored, having given that router a unique SSID to which I connected my phone. I connected the Wireshark PC to the port that was receiving a mirror of the router/access-point, with another port connected to the rest of my LAN. Now I could guarantee that any traffic between my phone and the internet (and hence the misbehaving site) would be echoed to the Wireshark PC.

It worked a treat. I saw some very odd behaviour, with TCP packets from the phone to the site retrying at 2, 4, 8, ... seconds because they never got a response from the web server. I'm not sure quite how to interpret the results and where the blame might lie, but at least I've got the trace so my ISP and/or the web site owner can investigate further.

For now I take the coward's way out: when I want to access that site I turn off wifi on my phone to force it to use mobile internet instead. Normally it works, but then for a week or so it consistently fails. My router gets allocated various different WAN addresses by my ISP, in various different subnets; also the order of primary and secondary DNS alternates from time to time (presumably the DHCP-like mechanism that the ISP uses to allocate WAN IP to the router hands out different addresses when the connection is renewed). However my theory was untrue: whether the phone could or couldn't access the site did not seem to be affected by which range of IP addresses or which order DNS server were used by the router's WAN connection.

My mistake then. I didn't think mine had the ability to configure a static IP for the router. You can do it for the WAN port, but that's not the same thing. I thought mine was hardcoded to be 192.168.0.1.

I used to set my gateway to 10.20.30.40 because I thought, at the time, that anyone could "guess" that it's 192.168.{0,1}.1 but over time, it became a pain to constantly change all the defaults so I let it go.

I used to change the router MAC addresses for the same reason, but then I realized you can't change the _one_ MAC that matters most for privacy.

For most of us (all of us?) the incoming WAN IP address is handed to us by the ISP, where mine is a WISP so mine comes to me from a variety of access points, all of which are miles away (so my WAN is set to get it by DHCP).

Given most of us are using MAC randomization now, that negates the "assignment" of a static IP on the router to be handed to devices.

This is particularly pernicious when you have an iPad as Android handles the MAC randomization better (IMHO) in that Android 10 made it the default for MAC randomization per SSID (which routers can easily handle); but Android 11 added the capability (which I use all the time) for MAC randomization per connection (which routers have a hard time handling).

Hence, for a "static IP address" on my Android, I make that request on the phone itself, using a set of IP addresses outside the router DHCP range.

I never fully understood how reserving IP addresses works, but if you randomize your MAC address per connection, it's harder on the router.

If you ask why you want a static IP address when you're randomizing the MAC on every connections, it's because of Windows scripts I use with Android.

Some of those scripts use the Android unique serial number though, and therefore those scripts which don't need a static IP address work anyway.

But many of the Windows networking scripts require the Android IP address.

These scripts are mostly needed when you're networking Android to Windows.

Such that, for example, you download a file on Windows and it's on Android.

By doing this magic, you can now just _slide_ APKs from Windows to Android and they automatically install themselves, which makes setup really easy.

Of course, I'm sure if you're a good Windows coder, you don't need a static IP address in your scripts so then you can concentrate on solving the fact that Android randomizes every Wi-Fi connection to the PC using a unique so-called Wi-Fi Debugging Pairing Code (which changes on every connect).

If someone could solve _that_ problem, they'd be a genius in my book.

Finally found it! Netgear R7000. It was very, very buried on the advanced page (LAN setup). It simply doesn't exist on the basic page.

Incubus snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news:ttufsu$t021$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Your end analysis isn't quite on the mark.

First off, a router and access point, are technically two different things. A router (in the SOHO world) is a device that provides NAT translation so many different IP devcies 'inside' the network can share one sinlge 'global' IP address.

An access point, is a wireless device acting as a master radio, that multiple clients can connect to to get onto a LAN.

A router can be standalone, an access point can be standalone, or it can be a combo- device offering both functionalites.

So why use an old router as a 'client bridge'? For one, to extend the network, and offer additional wired ports for other devices. OK...that's it. For one...There is no other use than to provide a LAN connection for a group of wired devices that may not have wireless capabilities of their own. Three devices can be wired into the LAN ports, and then all three share the wireless connectivity back to the main AP. One thing it does do, however, is provide slightly better aggregate throughput, back to that main AP. There is only one WLAN connection serving those three devices, rather than all three of them trying to coordinate their WLAN functionality separately.

The other thing, if that old router/AP, IS concurrent dual band, you may be able to connect the WLAN devices on 2.4, and 'backhaul' it to the main AP at 5.8 or visa- versa. That way, no speed is 'cut in half' receiving and then retransmitting on the same AP. Any speed loss that way, is based on the quality and max connection speed of 2.4 & 5.8G connections to said repeater, not because it gets cut in half trying to rebroadcast on the same 2.4 or 5.8Ghz AP.

But, WIRED IS ALWAYS BETTER for reliability and speeds.

true but in that scenario, you'd be limited to 2.4gz speeds, which are

a better option is a tri-band unit, which uses a second 5ghz band for the backhaul. there are also quad-band routers.

an even better option (in most cases) is a wired backhaul, however, wired isn't always an option, and for wifi 6 (and later), wired gigabit will be a bottleneck.

not always. that depends on the wire and wireless.

wifi 6 is *faster* than gigabit wired ethernet, but not as fast as

most people have gigabit, making it the limiting factor, which is why many wifi 6 routers have at least one 2.5gb port, some 10gb-e.

nospam snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid wrote in news:100320231524307943% snipped-for-privacy@nospam.invalid:

That is true. But I was just repurposing old gear.

Sure, in theory. In a real-world scenario, I'd doubt it. Beleive me, my job *is* wireless.

So, the signalling rate of 2 chain AC radios is up to 866 mbps. I've done a lot of testing, with these, and the max actual user throughput, is around 600mbps, using UDP only. To get that speed, you need pristine conditions, signal level up in the neg 40's, and one AP with only one client.

Once other devices are added to the mix, at different signal levels, which use different modulation rates, you will never get an aggregate user bandwidth even near that

Even WiFi-6 same, thing. Sure, the high theoretical throughput sounds great, but once you add devices that aren't operating at the highest mod rates at strong signal levels...that will drop.

In reality, GB ethernet isn't 1GB in speed. It's typically full duplex, so simultaneously

This page has a chart for AC gear, that tells you the required RSSI per modulation rate.

These are theoretical minimum signal levels. This is without multipath, without other vying for signal time, without outside interference.

Those really high speed numbers for AX are also based on really wide channels, like

I'm going to stick with my original statement...

...for performance and reliability, wired will always beat wireless, at this time.