Linksys WRT54G & ?Bridging?

Airhead got it almost entirely right:

However, you don't need to spend the $ for it. Sveasoft distributes Satori firmware freely, and it will do exactly what is desired, in three different ways.

In the first two cases one unit has to be an AP. The second unit can be either a repeater or a client. If it is a repeater then the connection to it must be via a wireless client. If it is a client, then no other wireless connection can be made with it, and an ethernet link is required (but the AP can still make multiple connections).

Another way to do it is to run both units as clients in an Ad-Hoc mode, which is essentially a point-to-point link for both ends and allows no other wireless connections to either unit.

The Satori firmware has a great deal of other functionality, and is well worth downloading. Sveasoft's aggressive marketing of a beta version may or may not be distasteful to any given individual, and if it is not perhaps purchasing the latest release if worth doing, or not; and if Sveasoft is indeed deemed distasteful in their business practices, perhaps downloading and using their free version is an appropriate way to thumb your nose at the practices you don't like!

A waste of time and good money. Get the Satori software for free, and having working in a few minutes.

Playstation2,

seemed to

Wrt54Gs are not bridges, they are APs that wont discuss things among each other. There is some firmware out there that you can use such as sveasoft that can give you added functionallity for $.

For upstairs, you want a WAP54G or a WET54G, both of which will bridge to a WRT54G. Return the second WRT54G and get one of the others.

Tom

Yeah, I had a hard time justifying buying a single-purpose WAP54G that did not even have a switch built in...yet cost more than the WRT54G.

I don't know, it just seems to me that this would be a common scenario for people with multi-floor homes that the router should be able to handle.

I'll look into the third-party firmwares... Thanks for the suggestion...

So, out of curiosity... what impact does the Gateway / Router mode have? Given the description of these modes in the manual, it seemed to me that I just needed to have the one downstairs connected to my cable modem in Gateway mode and the one upstairs in Router mode with a static route to the one downstairs.

Actually they are wireless routers with a 4 port swith that can be placed in AP mode. inorder to do what you want you would have to have on of them set as your router then connect the second AP via ethernet to the router.

Robert....

Yep. Or you could also use a CAT5 wired ethernet connection between the two WRT54G units.

The one downstairs can use either the WAN/Internet port to connect to the modem, or could also be configured to use one of the LAN/Ethernet ports. Whatever, you can connect 4 ethernet devices to it, plus the WAN/Internet port.

If you use a wired ethernet connection to the upstairs WRT54G, then you don't need the third party firmware (though it is still nice, and you might want to use it anyway).

Yep. That pretty much sums it up. I have a couple of them doing essentially the same thing, except I use have both of them in router mode. I have a dialup Internet connection which runs off of a dedicated Linux firewall, so the WRT54G's are just used to provide a wireless AP. I use the second one as a repeater, plus a WRE54G repeater, which gives me 3 each AP sites.

Ok, I bought the Sveasoft Alchemy firmware and setup the upstairs router as a client. I set it up to use the static IP 192.168.1.2 on the downstairs router and devices upstairs can now get through to the Internet.

The only problem that remains is that devices on the different routers cannot see each other.

Here's the setup...

Downstairs: Router: 192.168.1.1 Mask: 255.255.255.128 DHCP: .1.50 - .1.99

Upstairs: IP: 192.168.1.2 Gateway: 192.168.1.1 Router: 192.168.1.129 Mask: 255.255.255.128 DHCP: .1.150 - .1.199

Is it possible to setup some k> I think "bridge" is the term I am looking for...

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That's the easy way. You actually could keep the subnetting that you originally proposed, but the tricks to get that into the route tables of the WRT54G are sort of complex.

Have you experimented yet with enabling telnetd, and logging into the WRT54G to look around?

Well, for anyone out there wondering how to solve this problem...here goes...

---Downstairs router connected to Internet--- Internet configure using DHCP Router IP: 192.168.1.1/255.255.255.0 Gateway: 0.0.0.0 DHCP Server: Enabled DHCP .1.50 - .1.99 Access Point Mode Mixed Wireless Mode (B+G) SSID: Wireless Channel: SSID Broadcast Enabled WPA Enabled MAC Filter: WDS: Enable LAN binding for the other router's MAC LazyWDS disabled WDS subnet disabled Firewall enabled Block anonymous internet requests enabled

---Upstairs router--- Internet disabled Router IP: 192.168.1.2/255.255.255.0 Gateway: 0.0.0.0 DHCP server disabled Access Point Mode Mixed Wireless Mode (B+G) SSID: same as above Wireless Channel: same as above SSID Broadcast Enabled WPA Enabled MAC Filter: WDS: Enable LAN binding for the other router's MAC LazyWDS disabled WDS subnet disabled Firewall enabled Block anonymous internet requests enabled

....and viola, works for me... and h> Ok, I bought the Sveasoft Alchemy firmware and setup the upstairs router

Not really. After three days of messing around, I just wanted it to work...

You have me interested, though. I started thinking about it, and it seemed like devices connected to the routers had to be on the same subnet. I figured the ReplayTVs, for instance, just look at their subnet masks and scan IPs within that subnet for other ReplayTVs. At least, that made sense with my limited understanding of networking. I didn't think there would be a way around that in the routing tables.