Hi

I'm trying to set my EA4500 as wireless range extender using this recipe: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/recipes/relayclient

I get up to the start of step 3 before I start having problems. Everything in steps 1 and 2 seem to work, and the EA4500 registers as a client on the main router's network (HG556a Rev C, running stock Vodafone firmware) wlan0 gets an address ect. but the internet connection seems to break after a short while. When the connection is first made I can ping 8.8.8.8 and get a reply, and everything works for the first few seconds, but then the internet connection just stops working (the ping gets stuck on the router and the ping running on my Windows machine connected to the router says "Reply from 192.168.1.1: Destination port unreachable."). I can't do opkg update or anything like that either. The same thing seemed to happen when I abandoned the wireless client idea and jut ran an ethernet cable between the main router and the EA4500.

I've tried with the stock firmware provided, as well as my own custom build (with LuCI) and both get me to same point and reproduce the same problem. I can't think of anything I'm doing wrong, I tried the same thing with the HG556a rev. C last month and it worked as expected (but it's now back on stock firmware because I need the ADSL functionality). How do I get around this issue?

Is the main router using a 192.168.1.0 network?
Is that the same that you still have configured in the new router?

Yes, I think the main router is using a 192.168.1.0 network - all the IP addresses are like 192.168.1.x

I haven't changed any network settings on the OpenWrt (EA4500) router, so it should still be on its default network address range (which is the same).

You should not have two networks with the same configuration in your installation: the OpenWrt has two interfaces (WAN and LAN) configured equal, and that will produce problems similar as those you describe. Before connecting the OpenWrt router to the main router, configure its LAN interface on another network (192.168.2.0/24, for example).