Setup a wireless bridge. Thanks for your help.

[techs]

Awhile back I posted asking for recommendations on how to get internet and network access in another part of my house that can't get a network cable.

People here suggested a second wireless router set up as a bridge.

So I got another exact Linksys WRT-54GL and flashed it with the same DD-WRT on my first one.

Well, I couldn't get it to work reliably after following these directions:
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/php-bsd...idge-after-flashing-with-ddwrt-software-21161

Apparently it didn't mention that I needed to change the i.p. of the second router so it did not only conflict with the first one, but I had to choose an ip that was on the list of allowed ip's on the first router (192.168.100-149)

Bingo. Everything works great.

Thanks for all your help.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Actually, I would check that IP that you used. The 100-149 is the default DHCP address space that the DD-WRT distribution will reserve for use of DHCP clients. With the wireless bridge you want to specify an IP address that is NOT part of that DHCP block. That said, you may also have to add the wireless MAC address of the wireless bridge under the security tab in the MAC Address Table... It may work fine right now, but you may in the future run into a problem with multiple systems thinking they have that one IP address (since your primary wireless router believes it is in control of allocating IP addresses in the 100-149 range, and if it decides to use the same one that you used for the bridge, you will have an IP conflict on your network and strange things tend to happen).

For instance, my main router is 192.168.1.1, my bridge router is 192.168.1.2 (my GbE switch is 192.168.1.3), my DHCP clients are 192.168.1.100-110 (I only have 5 that use DHCP so I only left 10 spots open, no sense having more). I have other devices that are assigned a static IP address from the DHCP server but that gets complicated (for instance, my HTPC is always assigned 192.168.1.50, my server is 192.168.1.80, my database server is 192.168.1.75... this is really more of a DNS thing then DHCP, but because I have so many devices, it was best to start organizing especially since DD-WRT has the capability to do this on the better routers).

DD-WRT has a wiki about how to do this and talks a bit about the very thing I mentioned, and to set the wireless bridge to 192.168.1.2 (at least in their example).

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge

 

[techs]

Actually, I would check that IP that you used. The 100-149 is the default DHCP address space that the DD-WRT distribution will reserve for use of DHCP clients. With the wireless bridge you want to specify an IP address that is NOT part of that DHCP block. That said, you may also have to add the wireless MAC address of the wireless bridge under the security tab in the MAC Address Table... It may work fine right now, but you may in the future run into a problem with multiple systems thinking they have that one IP address (since your primary wireless router believes it is in control of allocating IP addresses in the 100-149 range, and if it decides to use the same one that you used for the bridge, you will have an IP conflict on your network and strange things tend to happen).

For instance, my main router is 192.168.1.1, my bridge router is 192.168.1.2 (my GbE switch is 192.168.1.3), my DHCP clients are 192.168.1.100-110 (I only have 5 that use DHCP so I only left 10 spots open, no sense having more). I have other devices that are assigned a static IP address from the DHCP server but that gets complicated (for instance, my HTPC is always assigned 192.168.1.50, my server is 192.168.1.80, my database server is 192.168.1.75... this is really more of a DNS thing then DHCP, but because I have so many devices, it was best to start organizing especially since DD-WRT has the capability to do this on the better routers).

DD-WRT has a wiki about how to do this and talks a bit about the very thing I mentioned, and to set the wireless bridge to 192.168.1.2 (at least in their example).

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Bridge

That's what I did originally, gave the bridge 192.168.1.2 and also tried 192.168.2.1
It kept locking up, or losing the connection.
Once I gave it an allowed ip from the routing table of the router it worked great.
Wasn't sure why, but, hey, it's been working fine for a few days now.