TP-Link TL-WR902AC v3 as client

Hi,

I searched at google and this forum to find a solution for my issue without luck. Perhaps someone can give me a hint or the solution of this problem. I flashed the router with openwrt 22.03.3 and I am trying to get it running as client. WLAN is a Samsung A53 5G hotspot, the router should connect as client and connect a LAN device to the WLAN. I configured the 5G to connect to the hotspot, seems to be working. But I don´t get it linked with the LAN interface properly. I suppose I am missing something with the configuration in general, either DHCP issues, the linking or perhaps some firewall issue?

The stock firmware is quite easy to setup for the client mode but there was just the issue not to be able to use channel 149 with 5 GHz WLAN.

Thanks in advance for any help or hint.

Regards,

Markus

Hi Markus,

Welcome to OpenWrt!

From the looks of your post, if you want to use the TP-Link to be able to add LAN devices to the A53's hotspot, that you are looking to configure your TP-Link as a client bridge.

It sounds like you have the WiFi client connection set up. But to bridge a WiFi connection across to the LAN (or other WiFi radio) you need one of two things extra:

  1. A special WDS/four-address WiFi mode on BOTH the client and server.
  2. A special helper interface on the client, called relayd.

Since you are unlikely to be able to meet the requirements for #1 (very difficult to do across vendors and firmwares), I would refer you to a a great wiki article setting up for #2. This is one of the first things I did with an OpenWrt device, and I know from experience that the article's procedure works well.

If you have further questions, searching for the term "client bridge" on the forum should bring up some further discussions. I started a couple threads myself with questions about a client bridge and bridging a second WiFi radio in, and about using WireGuard in that scenario.

Feel free, of course, to post questions here too.

And again, welcome! It's a great community here.

1 Like

Just a heads up.

I have two of these running as dummy bridges.

There is a bug in the mt76 driver that prevents you from getting any real signal out of them, at least on the 5ghz interface. Its all a bit beyond me but it appears to be reading the wireless adapter firmware incorrectly and thus you will be locked at 6dbm. But there is a fix on github, I am unsure if it has made its way into master yet or if it ever will as its a bit of a hack:

Thanks alot. At least I got my head around this topic much more with this info. I also found a very suitable article on github, "Relayd Wireless Bridge in OpenWRT". Very short and quick how-to. I did set everything up and i get a ping reply within the diag aswell as a tracert. But i run into a problem with the relayd software package. When updating the lists I get "unable to execute opkg update command: syntaxerror: unexpected end of JSON input".

Any idea how to fix this?

Thanks in advance and also thanks for the warm welcome and immediate help.

Regards,

Markus

You say you can ping, is that just internally or can you also ping an outside address? Try to ping both, say, google.com and 1.1.1.1. That will tell you if you have DNS and external connectivity.

Both are possible. And yet the error message remains. I have no idea how to get this fixed.

Thanks.

Regards,

Markus

Are you using opkg directly, or from the web UI?
If you are SSHing into the unit, can you try a few things?

  1. Post the full output of
    opkg update
  2. What is the contents of your /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf?
    cat /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf
  3. What happens if you try and wget one of the files in distfeeds.conf manually?
    wget $(cat /etc/opkg/distfeeds.conf | grep https | grep -v \# | tail -n 1 | cut -d " " -f 3)

Thanks.