so i got myself an RE450 , and installed openwrt on it and set it up as repeater. Whenever RE450 is plugged through an Ethernet cable to my switch, clients are getting connected through wifi without any problems. But whenever i unplug the cable and try to reconnect to the same wifi network, it says "Failed to obtain an ip address" Does anyone know what am i missing?
When you have the cable connected, do client devices get IP from the upstream router's DHCP? Are they on the same subnet?
yes , they get IP's from my pfsense router's DHCP on the same subnet.
So it makes sense that when the AP is disconnected from the pfsense, there is no DHCP server (if it's turned off on the AP)!
What are you trying to achieve by disconnecting the AP?
i want it to act as an extender, without any cables attached to it . When i was on official firmware , it was acting as it should . It seems like with openwrt i cannot make it to work.
To work as a transparent repeater, you need a layer 2 bridge. This can be achieved in multiple ways. If both are running OpenWrt, at least with Atheros/Qualcomm wireless, WDS can often be used. There are other approaches, but they are either beyond LuCI config (such as explicit tunnels) or somewhat “hacky”, such as relayd.
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In addition to what @jeff said, if you don't need to have the clients of the RE450 on the same subnet as the upstream router, you can use something like Travelmate package to achieve what you want.
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