Home Wireless Network

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Using OpenWRT with WPA-PSK 2 on Broadcom WLAN routers have been stuck on a quite old bug. Recently someone suggested that it may have been fixed in trunk, which caused me to test it. And it works!

It took some time to work out the details here. To save myself time to reconstruct the commands, and hopefully save you some time too, I wrote down how to use OpenWRT with two Asus WL-500g Premium linked together wirelessly using WDS and PSK2 encryption.

The writeup is long, so I put it on a separate page:

http://josefsson.org/openwrt/wlan.html.

If you are interested in using OpenWRT with a 3G connection, you may find my summer house internet writeup more useful.

14 Replies to “Home Wireless Network”

  1. Hello!
    Thanks for your howto, everything works good. I’ve only had some problems with getting the internet connection working on the router without wan connection. I’ve had to manually assign static network settings for wan interface on this router (copied the ip address of the wan interface from the gateway router and as a gateway address set the local ip address of that router), but now I’m very happy openwrt user.
    Regards.

  2. Hi
    On the device that has dnsmasq diabled, add dns and default gw entries so ipkg stil works …

  3. Hi,
    I find kamikaze 8.08.1 useless with psk2 encryption. I can’t even connect to the ap with psk2 or wep enabled. I’ve flashed my routers with this version, then with my own build form 16.06.2009 and wireless with encryption enabled isn’t working.

  5. Thanks so much for your howto. It is much clearer than any of the official OpenWrt documentation.

    One thing I noticed on my pair of WRT54GL routers is that a soft reboot often prevents the WDS link from working, and you can only recover it by pulling the power out of the back of the router and then reconnecting. This cost me hours of frustrated editing of configuration files.

  6. Thank you for this HOWTO! I have been looking fo an OpenWRT+WDS tutorial, and this was just perfect. I just had to figure out that I needed to set up one of the routers to use the other as gateway and DNS server, but that’s trivial.

    Thanks a lot!

  7. Pingback: OpenWRT 10.03 “Backfire” « Simon Josefsson’s blog

  8. Hello!

    You wrote very good How-To on bridging two networks using WDS.

    I just wondering what would be OpenWrt analog to Wireless Status page (info) in DD-Wrt. It has:

    Wireless Nodes
    Clients
    WDS Nodes

    TX Rate RX Rate Signal Noise SNR Signal Quality

    I was trying to find command line instructions or LuCI module, but it seems there is no info on it.

  9. Is your system still up and running?

    I am trying the came with an asus wl-500g deluxe, and I get the impression that all configuration related to WDS gets ignored. I use backfire, that might be an issue, but I cannot find any useful documentation.

  10. moozer: Yes it is working reliably for me, including WDS. I’m using WL-500g Premium V1, not Deluxe, so there could be some hardware difference. You need to be careful to enter MAC addresses correctly, or WDS will not work. Good luck.

    /Simon

  11. You mention that ‘any two OpenWRT routers should be fine’ – it is best if they are both the exact same make and model (down to version number) to ensure they both handle WDS in the same way.

  12. Gerard: I thought the WDS protocol was standardized? Any pointers on this problem? I’ve typically only used similar devices in my WDS networks so I cannot confirm or reject your hypothesis, but it seems really bad if there is anything in WDS that software cannot fix. I can understand the problem if you aren’t using OpenWRT on all devices, then there could be software compatibility problems between the two devices.

    /Simon

  13. Thank you for this How-To, it’s very clear and complete. I do have a question about the WDS-SSID. You say “take a different SSIS then the normal AP SSID”, but is that mandatory or best practice ?
    The standard documentation on this ( http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/recipes/broadcomwds ) does not have a different SSID.
    I have WDS working now with three netgear WRT54, but also have 4 SSID’s in use now (1 AP, 3 WDS-links), and prefer to have only the AP-one and use that SSID also for WDS.
    Before I change it, i would like to hear your opinion on this ? Thanks in advance !
    ES

  14. ES: That is a good question, I must admit that I don’t know what the recommended best practice is — either use the same SSID for the WDS or another SSID. I wouldn’t change it just because I chose to have different SSIDs. I’m interested in hearing other people’s opinion on this.

    /Simon