and just as footnotes, these routers will link AS A REPEATER without security and will link as client-bridge and repeater-bridge WITH WPA2 Personal AES with no settings changed on the host.
Try setting a gateway of your primary router on the dd-wrt router, and make sure that your primary is wpa2-aes ONLY. Then you could also try different forms of security, such as wpa-tkip etc. and see if any of those match up. Sometimes people have had success with other security, but I have never found it to be reliable. _________________ SIG:
I'm trying to teach you to fish, not give you a fish. If you just want a fish, wait for a fisherman who hands them out. I'm more of a fishing instructor.
LOM: "If you show that you have not bothered to read the forum announcements or to follow the advices in them then the level of help available for you will drop substantially, also known as Murrkf's law.."
ok. Sure is a picky little thing. As I mentioned previously, I had tried setting the host to AES only, simply to be able to say I had tried and when it didn't work, went back to "or". As I had NOT mentioned, I had also tried setting the gateway.
.......HOWEVER!!! haha, it never crossed my mind to do both simultaneously. I just set the host to AES only AND set the gateway on dd-wrt and bling! there goes the connection. I'm on it now. I am willing to openly admit where my assumptions were wrong, and even though it makes no logical sense, it worked. I'm still classifying this as a bug in my book, but with a workaround.
Again, for those in the future finding this post through search, I tried these steps individually and they did NOT work............ I tried them together and poof! Magic. Thanks again guys. I'm off to play with my router. I wish I had a few more laying around to mess with and learn from, but the closest I've come is to flashing 2 of my friends' routers.