Tangled up in all the wire(less)s

[adwilk]

I'm in desperate need of networking help. I hate feeling like a NOOB. Geesh. I got a new tablet and the wireless receiver isn't so great so I thought i'd upgrade my router. On that side of the house I also have a WDTV that isn't currently online. I thought I could kill two birds with one stone and get repeater/bridge solution in one. I ordered and received a Monoprice router with WDS and Bridge mode. I'm curious. Can I use bridge mode to connect a device via ethernet cable and also repeat the wireless network with internet? I also have another wireless router that I could run the wired bridge to. I'm officially lost. Please help.

 

[krzywica]

The bridged mode is for bonding two wireless routers together to form a LAN over wireless. IE like a bridge. If you are planning on running a LAN cable between the two you don't need bridged mode. You should be able to just set the secondary router to "router" mode and disable the DHCP server. Also depending on the router you might need to plug your LAN uplink from the main router into a switch port on the extended router as apposed to the WAN port.

 

[adwilk]

Thanks for the reply.. but I did figure out what I was trying to do. Basically, I needed to create a bridge and also extend the wireless network. I have modem/router1 upstairs broadcasting there. My WDTV I wanted to connect was downstairs and a wired solution was not an option. The wireless signal downstairs was also pretty weak so repeating that signal was also something I wanted to accomplish. I wanted to maintain a single network.

I used router2 as a bridge and hooked up router3 to it using a wired cat5 connection. Bypassed all DHCP on router 2/3 and it seemed to work. I forgot to enable security on the second router and couldn't figure out its IP address so after getting things to work, I reset both router2/3 to configure a little better (static IPs, Security, etc.)

I enabled bridge mode on router two again, but decided to to allow it to broadcast a wireless SSID- I then found a setting that would allow it to run as a client and access point simultaneously. I know this hurts performance a bit, but I'm really only accessing the internet and some very minor file management and streaming. It works and its plenty fast. Router 2 was 15 bucks from monoprice and I'm happy.... and more importantly, sane. Amazing how much I learned today that I'll have forgotten tomorrow.