On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Bob Copeland <bcopeland@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 10:28 AM, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
If you set the second router into wireless ethernet bridge mode (not wireless client mode), then dhcp requests should just pass through to the dhcp server on the main router that is the wifi access point.
The second router should not have any firewall or anything like that enabled. It is purely a wired to wireless ethernet bridge and should not be getting involved in the actual packets anymore.
Not every device supports this mode though: you need to be able to use 4-address framing at the wireless level, so that the source address on the ethernet segment is preserved (see: http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/clientmode)
If you happen to have ath9k on board, you can use 802.11s for this kind of thing: run both a mesh and AP interface on each access point and join them with the mesh interface. Then, your clients can connect to either AP and even roam between them based on RSSI or whatever. 11s is designed to make all the participants look like they are on the same LAN so DHCP etc. will work across it and you don't have to run separate IP networks.
(I work on 802.11s in Linux.)
Embarrassingly, I understand very little of that...however, it is working. The computer has internet, and everyone can see each other on the network. The only limitation is security. It only works with WPA and AES, no WPA2 or TKIP enabled on either router. I suppose my neck is exposed security wise? I never needed anyone to connect wirelessly to the second router. The signal from the main router, the Buffalo N600, is amazing, it covers the entire house. Actually, as I understood it, the second router would not even be offering wireless connectivity to devices in Wireless Bridge Mode. -- Thomas Milne