I’ve done it before, but it’s just no fun.A router running DD-WRT v24 is able to create a wireless bridge. Next up is putting DD-WRT on a new-in-box La Fonera it’s slightly more involved than uploading new firmware to a web interface. I haven’t tested it outside of my apartment yet. Once I figured that out, it worked just as expected. It has been very hard to verify that fact though. The only problem I ran into was connecting to my Airport Extreme which uses WPA2… and AES (not TKIP) by default. I followed these instructions for setting up a universal wireless repeater. You do this by setting up a virtual wireless interface. The router will attach to the access point of your choice and then rebroadcast the signal as the SSID of your choosing. In addition to ‘client’ and ‘client bridge’ mode bridge means the connection isn’t NAT’d DD-WRT now has ‘repeater’ and ‘repeater bridge’ mode. I installed the latest version of DD-WRT and discovered that it has learned a new trick.

I recently dug the router out because a friend is in a similar situation. I was using it in client bridge mode which means it would connect via WiFi to the remote access point and serve the connection to anything on the wired ports (one of which was another WRT). When I first started playing with the WRT, it was to steal internet in a new apartment while I waited for my actual connection to be installed. I believe the one pictured above was originally a Fon purchased during the transition. Linksys continued to produce a Linux compatible version of the router called the WRT54GL. Later in life this was switched to non-open VxWorks. It’s a wireless 802.11b/g router that originally ran Linux as its OS. The Linksys WRT54G has always been one of my favorite hacking targets.

Dd wrt v24 sp2 wireless repeater