[Constantine Evans]

I happen to have a few spare WRT54G's. However, what I really need is a regular AP/switch without the full routing or NAT. I have seen some reports that it is possible to set up some of the wired ports on the router to act in this fashion, but haven't found a way to do this with the wireless.

Is this possible?

[metala]

What you want is to make a wifi bridge or you want your wifi to be a repeater?

[Christopher]

All he wants to do is use the ethernet ports on his router as a dumb switch - to give him more physical ethernet ports to plug hardware into. No wireless involved.

I'm also trying to configure a Buffalo to perform the same function. It's connected via the WAN to my primary router (dsl modem router) via cat5, but while it gets an IP from the main router it won't let any machines connected to it get an IP Oddly, if I connect my laptop to the main router's wifi connection, I can see the DD-WRT router's admin pages - but if I plug a computer into the DD-WRT router's ethernet ports, I can't see the admin pages or even ping the IP!

AND, if I plug the cable from the main router into one of the DD-WRT router's ethernet sockets (as opposed to the WAN uplink port), nothing happens at all.

Really annoying! I hope someone knows how to achieve this :/

[dicksons]

Constantine, Christopher

it's really easy to do an AP-only configuration --


http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wireless_Access_Point

[Christopher]

[edit] never mind, the router now seems to be recognising all the machines connected to it, and correctly assigning DNS entries for all the machines... Very odd that it didn't do it before, considering I'd rebooted both the router AND all machines connected to it several times, as well as the main router running the network. Don't ya just love computers.

So, disregard this post! If you experience the same problem, just bear what I wrote before in mind but remember that the problem will probably resolve itself after a while... I'm suspecting cached DHCP assignments as the culprit which persisted through even router reboots for some odd reason. Can't be sure, though. [/edit]

Hmm, I already saw that guide, read through it and compared it with what I'd done last time... Almost the same.

It was a bit confusing, but I sorted myself out. I'm still having a really odd problem - with the right combination of options set, both my laptop (when connected via cat5) and my PC (via cat5 always) again now pick up their IPs correctly via static DHCP assignment from the main router.

The machines can see the Internet and can ping the router, each other. However, one of the machines plugged into the DDWRT switch can't even get an IP unless I manually configure it (and so I'm setting it with the same IP as it was statically assigned via DHCP, except I'm manually applying it). If I leave it to get an IP via DHCP, it doesn't succeed. The maddening thing is that the network chipset in the problem machine is a Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet chipset, and it's plugged into a DDWRT switch which is running on a Broadcom chipset! Argh! I've tried swapping ethernet cables, I've tried all the ports on the device... It's REALLY odd. If I plug that machine directly into the main router with a really long cat5 cable, it works. If I manually set an IP on the machine, it works. If I try to use DHCP through the switch... It can't see the server.

It works (with my bodge), but what gives? :(

Also I really think there should be a simpler way of setting up a DD-WRT router as a plain ole switch, at least a tickbox to tick which automatically provides you with the required boxes to fill in and disables the unneeded services for you, or at the very least a more descriptive Wiki howto! Even I got confused, and I've been fiddling about with DD-WRT routers for a good 18 months :/

[Constantine Evans]

Sorry, I posted this and then forgot about it. The wiki page seems to be exactly what I need, but for some reason I wasn't able to find it before. Thank you.