I am completely new to openwrt, but i have a lot of cisco knowledge i can relate on in my mind.
I bought some cheap WRT54GL with Openwrt Backfire 10.03.1 pre installed.. I want to connect to my Providers city-wide free WiFi via WPA2 Enterprise like i do it with my phone all the time. I activated the 2nd Wifi on my router, so i am allowed to connect to any other router from the same provider.
there is only one spot in my appartment where i have good network signal strenght, there i want to place one of the wrt54gl and share the internet connection to my LAN. i just prefer wired LAN bc of some devices that habe no wifi like my laser printer f.e. but it has web access - or should have.
I succeeded, installing wpad, getting every setting tmdone to finally connect to the wifi, at least it looks like that in LuCi.
and i have a home IP Range on the LAN side.
my routers IP is 192.168.0.1
my Wifi Connection always gets an IP like 10.40.xx.xx or 10.42.xx something like that
completely different IP Range.
when i connected to my phone wifi Hotspot, same IP Range, the connection was routed through as i want it to be with wi-free.
but as soon as i connect to that wi-free again, IpV4 connection lost.
has anyone an idea where my thiniing issue is?
i will post my config files later, if nessecary, but maybe by my info it is already possible to see what is my issue?
is it the subnet mask in the LAN Interface?
Do i have to manually set a gateway or DNS?
Is this device even supposed to link WiFi signals to the LAN ports? (or only other direction?)
this is my last screenshot from my experiments:
the 40% are only here while i do the screenshot. usually i have around 80% signal.
The WRT-54GL is no longer supported by OpenWrt, due to its completely insufficient RAM (16 MB) offerings (and 4 MB flash are also insufficient). OpenWrt 10.03.1 is about a decade old by now and has numerous severe security issues (aside from it no longer being supported), including the wireless side of it (especially regarding mschapv2 and similar 802.1x encryption schemes). Neither of these should be used -at all- in 2020/ 2021, especially not for 802.1x, due to a number of issues (security- and interoperability) that have been fixed within the last decade. Furthermore it's rather questionable if the necessary add-on packages did really fit into the limited overlay size of this device (it certainly doesn't today).
If you're interested in 802.1x, more modern devices with full OpenWrt support and sufficient system specifications can be found on the various markets for used devices starting around 5-10 EUR/ USD and even delivered/ new starting around 20 USD, these would provide you more cooperative wireless drivers and support for modern/ supported OpenWrt versions - with 10.03.1 (and especially the wrt-54gl) you're pretty much on your own.
I actually do have an Asus router that is only 1 year old, where this would be possible just with the original firmware, but i like to experiment with those old devices.
i don't care much about vulnerability or security, just because of the setting. only a fire TV stick and some phones connect to that wifi here and then just to watch some movies.
no security environment. my old wifi was completely open for a decade and there has been not even 1 additional connection additional to y own.
Maybe i will find the solution soon on my own. it can only be a routing issue bc i made a mistake in my settings.
my devices all have 65MB RAM and are more than good enough for what I do with them.
i am actually repeating a ~20MBit connection. - as soon as i am ready with my settings.
