Convert WDS wireless WiFi repeater to Wired WiFi repeater

Installing and Using OpenWrt Network and Wireless Configuration
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I have a TP-Link Archer C7 v5 with OpenWrt 21.02.1 on it that I set up as a wireless repeater using WDS as explained in the user guide here: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/atheroswds

My main router is an IQRouter v3 (it came pre-installed with OpenWrt).

I would like to change this setup so that the TP-Link is connected to the network via an Ethernet wire but still act as a wireless repeater. My goal is that the TP-Link should serve as only a connection point for wireless connections and should transparently let the IQRouter handle everything after that. I am wanting to make the TP-Link wired to the network mainly because the way our building is, there is no good place to put the TP-Link as a purely wireless bridge and still provide a good signal as well. I figure that if I can connect the TP-Link to the network via Ethernet, then the wireless signal from there will be stronger.

I had been given the suggestion on the unofficial Discord of bridging a physical port with the existing wireless bridge, turning off the client WiFi and then plugging into the wired port. What I don't know how to do is the first part of that, the bridging of a physical port with the existing wireless bridge.

When I go into LuCI on the TP-Link, the LAN interface is set to the br-lan bridge device, and the icons within the parentheses are of eth0.1 (saying Software LAN on it) and 4 radio icons for wlan0, wlan0-1, wlan1, and wlan1-1 (which I assume are the Master and Client connections currently in place). I tried to go to Devices and add a new Bridge Device, but I only see Ethernet Switch: "eth0", Switch VLAN: "eth0.1" and Switch VLAN: "eth0.2" (wan, wan6) there and I do not know what to select or if I'm doing something wrong. I know that eth0.2 is the wrong choice, at least.

Any help is appreciated. I've been told this should be super simple but I am missing the knowledge on how to do the physical port bridging necessary to change this setup.

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Remove repeater and use only WIFI as AP

1 Like
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There should already be a bridge called br-lan tying everything together-- WDS client, Ethernet LAN, and wifi AP. Just disable the wifi WDS client and connect an Ethernet cable to one of the LAN ports instead. This configuration is called a dumb AP. It would be better to disable the AP on the other side to make sure you have access by cable before changing any configurations in the Archer C7.

If you're not using the iqrouter extensions you could flash it to official OpenWrt obtained from downloads.openwrt.org

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When you say to disable the AP on the other side, do you mean the WiFi portion only? I want to make sure I'm not going to negatively affect the network while it is currently in use. Most clients on the network are wired as-is, though.

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What I'm saying is to temporarily shut down the AP that is serving this repeater, or simply change it to be non-WDS. This will break the wireless connection so you can plug in the wire. You never want both connections active at the same time because that is a network loop which will break the network-- packets go around and around the loop using all bandwidth, resulting in denial of service. Once working by wire, reconfigure the repeater by removing the WDS client entirely, then you can turn the AP back on.

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Thanks for pointing out Dumb AP earlier. I looked up the article in the user guide on that and was able to reconfigure the TP-Link properly to act as one.

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