Sorry for title.

For Christmas I got an Xbox360. The 360 and my wired network are at complete opposite ends of my home. There is not clean way to get cat5 to the 360. I started my research on finding a way to connect two wired networks via a wireless link. This was not easy but one thing was clear, my wrt54g v5 could not be flashed and I would need a new router anyways.

I bought a wrt54gl and put openWRT on it immediately. I then configured the unit with x-wrt which is a web GUI with many useful features to configure your router. If you are not comfortable SSHing into your router and configuring everything with vi, X-Wrt will take care of you.

I now had two routers and started playing around with them, connecting them with cat5 assigning different IPs and just trying to learn and get something meaningful accomplished.

Hours and weeks of googling never helped. I tried putting the wrt54gl in client mode and connecting to the wrt54g… nothing worked.
My big break came when I stumbled on the greatest link ever: http://www.bitsum.com/openwiking/owbase/ow.asp?WRT54G5%5FCFE
It’s a tutorial on how to flash the linksys wrt54g v5 with dd-wrt-micro. I flashed the router with ease and soon after had both routers running in AP mode with WDS enabled. My two wired networks connected by wireless link goal I started two months ago had been met!

Several new interesting issues came up when I got WDS up and running. dd-wrt on my wrtg54g V5 seemed to run much much better than openwrt on my wrt54gl. Things that I will cover soon in future posts:

  • dd-wrt vs openwrt
  • WDS is it a viable solution for the above applicaton
  • boosting xmit power of the routers, does it increase SNR of the WDS nodes?