Veteran of quite a few DD-WRT installations/administrations here, who's done a few OpenWRT and now LEDE installs as well. Not an expert at this by any means but do know my way around the DD-WRT interface and am familiar with the basic concepts and nomenclature of networking.
I recently flashed a couple of routers with LEDE--a TP-Link wr1043nd (v 2.1) and a Linksys EA3500--and have begun setting them up. The TP-Link will be the main router and DHCP server, the one that hooks to a cable modem and acts as gateway in my apartment. The Linksys will, after being hooked via its WAN port to the main router using a long ethernet cable, be placed in a remote location. That router should act as what I think of as a DHCP forwarder, and should give out, on both it's wired and wireless interfaces, addresses on the main router's subnet.
First question, have I got the terminology right? Is "DHCP forwarder" the right designation for the remote router in this description?
The main router is set up and seems to be working fine. Where I'm now having problems is setting up the remote router. I did not manage to find any step-by-step directives for doing this sort of thing under LEDE and decided that, since I'd done this once before under DD-WRT, I should be able to figure it out by trial and error under LEDE. Owing in part to the way LEDE's web interface differs from DD-WRT's and partly owing to my rather basic understanding of networking, things are not going very well.
I've so far managed to at least get the remote router to give out IP's in the main router's subnet via wifi, but it will not serve any IP's over its wired ports. Worst of all, I now seem to be locked out of the remote router. I can ping it and both its ipv4 and ipv6 addresses show up under the main router's "overview" page, but I can neither ssh in nor can I access its web admin page. That's a little strange since, though I do not believe I configured it to serve the web admin page over its WAN port, I do recall configuring it to accept ssh connections via the WAN port.
A couple of questions in closing, then. First, what else might I try in order to get access to the remote router either via ssh or its web admin page? I fear I might have to reset the unit, which could introduce additional headaches such as needing to reconfigure it again from scratch, or even cause the unit to revert to the stock Linksys firmware (I've seen indications that loading LEDE onto these units does not completely displace the stock firmware). So, do I have, short of performing a reset, options for regaining access to the unit's administration page or ssh interface?
Second, can anyone provide or point out to me a set of step-by-step instructions for setting up a DHCP forwarder such as I'm describing here? Thanks in advance.