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I need a spare wireless router to provide a wired connection to a pc (pc has no wireless adapter), while the spare router is connected to a 'primary' wireless router. My problem is that it does not seem all is working 100%. From the pc connected physically to the spare wireless router, Skype suddenly logged in successfully. It seems like the secondary router may not be providing dns from the primary router to this pc. I can ping a particular server by ip address, but no browsing works.

I configured the wireless basic settings to make it a repeater. I used the 'site survey' to discover and join this spare router to my primary router (status>wireless>site survey). Now I have my primary listed under wireless nodes.

Is there more that needs to be configured?

Roger
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  • well.. for now, I just pointed the pc to OpenDNS, and all is working. Still something I don't get about having the secondary router repeat the primary router's dns. Or.. maybe the pc cannot reach through the secondary router to the ip the primary gives it. – Roger Mar 23 '12 at 15:52

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I have done this many times with old WRT-54G routers repurposed as wireless network adapters.

The mode you're really looking for is "client bridge". Usually I start by configuring the router as a "client", make sure it is joined to the correct wireless network, and then switch the router to "client bridge". Once you've switched it to "client bridge", it's really hard to get to the configuration interface of the router-- so hard that I usually just do an NVRAM reset (with the button on the back) and start over.

In "client" mode, you'll experience double-NATting (both routers do NAT, and you better have picked different network numbers for WAN and LAN). Once you switch it to "client bridge" mode, the router that is acting as "client bridge" no longer does anything except act like a network adapter.

I've heard that if you connect multiple devices to the LAN ports of the DD-WRT device configured as "client bridge", they will all appear to come from the same MAC address (I can't verify that this is true). I usually only have one thing connected to the wired ports of a router configured this way.

I have had very good success sending Wake-on-LAN (WOL) magic packets through routers configured in this way to wake up the machine on the wired side, which is something you normally can't do on a wireless connection.

The mode you have chosen, "repeater", is more about extending the wireless signal's range. It apparently also works as a client on the LAN ports (which is nice to know).

Bluby
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