Hello everyone!

I have a WRT54GL with Backfire 10.03.1 RC4 and I'd like to set up a repeater bridge (like the one from DD-WRT) with WPA2 support.
The wiki, the forum and google are a great help but I only found solutions with different subnets OR the same subnet but without the actual repeater mode (only client bridge).

With DD-WRT I only have to select "Repeater bridge" for the first wifi device and then create a second, virtual, one which acts as AP. It works great.
With Backfire I tried something similar. First device (wl0) was "client" and the second device (wl0.1) was "AP". Unfortunately this didn't worked.

WDS is not a solution because the main router is a "Speedport" and it doesn't seem to support WDS.

Can anyone help me with this?

Thanks a lot!

Cypher

Are you sure you did connect both of these to an bridge interface ('lan' for example)?
It's also possible that the driver in that OpenWRT release doesn't support mixing of two Wireless modes for one radio and that DD-WRT made an other decision about the driver/kernel for your device.

Routed Client with relayd (Pseudobridge) - OpenWrt Wiki

Yes they were bridged.

When I tried to connect to the router (wl0.1) with a second PC it simply failed. (I don't mean those "Limited connectivity" errors when Windows can't find a DHCP server, it really didn't connect. Tried with multiple PCs.)

Then I set wl0 (sta) to a non-existing SSID and I was able to connect to wl0.1. So I guess it can't do those 2 things at once by default. However, with DD-WRT it works.

In DD-WRT, when in "Repeater Bridge" mode, I can see those two processes with the command "ps":

I tried to start exactly these processes with Backfire but only ONE of them works at the same time, depending on which I start first.
Also the OpenWRT-Wiki said "-l br0" can't work together with "-S" (client mode) but there it clearly works. I have no idea what that means or if it means anything at all.

Hm... if it's really impossible because of driver/kernel then I can't do much I guess. :S

Thanks for that but the router only acts as client as far as I can see, not as repeater. Or did I miss something?

---

Thanks for the help, you two!

(Last edited by Cypher on 18 Jun 2011, 00:19)

Bridged Client - OpenWrt Wiki

Thank you but as I wrote it doesn't work that easy.
It's the same problem: Only one mode (AP or client) seems to work at the same time. Therefore I can't set up this "Bridged Client" and create wl0.1 as AP at the same time because I can't connect to wl0.1 for some reason.

How about Kamikaze 8.09.2 brcm-2.4?

Some facts:
- version essentially does not matter wrt. brcm-2.4, its always the same driver
- it is a known issue that the ap will not work as long as the sta is not associated
- only radios with corerev 9 and above support multi ssid

Do you mean multiple "BSSID"? How about corerev 5-8?

Yeah multiple BSSIDs, or simply "multi SSID" in laymans terms. Corerev 5-8 will emit an error if you try to bring up a second interface.

I have read something about that before. So yeah, I'm running the 2.4 version.

That's something I didn't know. I should keep that in mind while testing.

Google told me I can check that with some NVRAM variable.
"wl0_corerev" is set to "9". So yeah, should work then.
//edit:
Ok that's not quite true. I SSH'd into the wrong box. The actual GL I try this with  has no "wl0_corerev" in NVRAM.

(Last edited by Cypher on 18 Jun 2011, 19:46)

I am wondering if anyone has made it work so far?

I am trying the same thing on RC6 but as soon as I bridge both wifi-ifaces (sta and ap) to lan I cannot associate with the ap anymore.

Does anyone know how dd-wrt does it on brcm-2.4 ?

Came across this setup more than 2 years ago.
If i do remember right, DD-WRT achieves it though a very special patched driver for the brcm-2.4.

We did give up WDS, Repeaters and s.o and went to quite unknown AWDS-Layer2-Mesh for small installations.

This runs on all versions of OpenWrt if the driver/chipset can do adhoc.

Adhoc & AP togehter is totally depending on the drivers though

I did write a short overview on AWDS on this formum.
You are welcome if you need more information about AWDS

regards
3zl

Thanks for the info. I'll try that out when I have some free time.