[dd-wrt_wifi_bridge]

I am having issues setting up a repeater bridge.

The problem I am trying to solve is I share wifi with my buddy. I rent a small apartment that was built into his garage. The Wifi Router is in his bedroom.

The total distance from where I mainly use the wifi (my living room) to his router is probably only 20 feet or so, but the signal travels through 2 exterior walls, and right where I sit on my couch it has to pass through a metal door and or my refrigerator. So it is REALLY slow!

I bought a used Netgear WNDR3700v4 off ebay, its Atheros based chip. My thought was I can place it in a spot in my apartment where it gets a good signal from his wifi router (eg. the bathroom) and it will rebroadcast the signal in my apartment, so it goes from my laptop to there, then to the main router without having to pass through my refrigerator or the metal door which I think are the main things that are blocking the signal.

I have tried setting this up 3 times without much success. The first time I set it up, it worked GREAT. Had really good speeds etc, but after two days, I noticed some of the settings had reset. Multicast in security had been turned off, dnsmasq had been turned back on, etc. And it stopped working effectively.

I factory reset and Installed the latest firmware, and the bridge is working but its REALLY REALLY slow and has horrible response times. So I am doing something right, but still missing something.

Has anyone else successfully set up a repeater bridge with this particular router, and if so what version of the firmware are you using? Anything I'm missing? I followed the official Instructions for installing/updating the dd-wrt firmware then setting up the bridge.

I also noticed that some things in the router administration page are named differently than in the bridge guide. Such as instead of being called "repeater bridge" it's called "station bridge", and some of the options on things they said to do are missing... I'm guessing the guide was written for older firmware version and those things have been changed.

Thanks in advance!

If I can't get this to work wireless I will see if he will allow me to buy a 30' ethernet cable and plug into his wifi router and run it into my house, plug it into mine and just have it bridge that way...

[Mr R Design]

Try these settings which are shown in the attached PDF. I have a similar scenario to you and share my neighbours internet which is 30ft away and it works perfect albeit with R7800's each end.

If you are trying to do the bridge using 5ghz don't. Connect the 3700 to his using 2.4Ghz (Station Bridge) and set a 5Ghz AP on the 3700.

(I don't think the 3700 will do ac and VHT80 so change that bit to whatever is available)

[egc]

Start with telling us the build you are running.

Current build is 50551, which does not have repeater bridge but has station bridge so you might have an outdated build. If you are running an outdated build then upgrade first and *after* upgrade reset to defaults, put settings in manually do not restore from a backup (to a different build).

See the forum guidelines with helpful pointers about how to research your router, where and what firmware to download, where and how to post and many other helpful tips:
https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=324087

The R7800 is a different beast then the WNDR3700v4 although both are Atheros based so some things are the same.

I also attached my notes about bridged solutions maybe they are helpful

[dd-wrt_wifi_bridge]

[egc]

Station bridge is an ugly hack, maybe it works, maybe not.

Chances are better for the 2.4 GHz to get it working, but just try and let us know

[dd-wrt_wifi_bridge]

So I read: "use WDS which is a real bridge (or its successor Mesh 802.11s)"

Is there any reason why I can't do this? I was only going to use Station Bridge because I thought it was my only option.

If there is a better way to rebroadcast the wifi without using a router I want to do that. I see in my option son the 3700's wireless setup that I can select radio mode AP(WDS), Station(WDS), Mesh / 802.11s...

Thanks guys, I am not entirely new to basic home networking in general, and quite familiar with linux and computers in general, but new to DD-WRT.

[egc]

WDS does only work if the chipsets are the same so if your main router has the same chipset (Qualcomm/Atheros) yes then use WDS as that is much, much better

Mesh is a WIP, not there yet, although there are people working with it

[dd-wrt_wifi_bridge]

I am going to look into WDS and see if it's possible. I know his router is Netgear, so theres a chance it has the same chipset...

I don't care about it having the same SSID, or whether or not it's on the same subnet.

Here's what I just did and it has provided the best results so far.

1. I set the 5ghz band to "Station" (not Station Bridge), with main router SSID/Pass
2. I set the 2.4ghz band to AP with a new SSID/Pass
3. I enabled dnsmasq and DHCP so 2.4ghz broadcasts new subnet. Instead of 192.168.1.x, the 3700 creates a subnet of 192.168.2.x

This seems to work better than anything I've done so far. I am going to attatch screenshots of what my speed was connecting directly to the main router, and what it is connecting to the 3700 set up like this. Its INSANE.

We will see if it stays stable and works, and in the meantime I will look into the WDS as that sounds better.

EDIT: So my understanding the ONLY reason why I would want to use "Station Bridge" over "Station" is if I want the re-broadcast router to be on the same subnet and or SSID?

[dd-wrt_wifi_bridge]

Also I think his 2.4ghz channel on his router is FXXXED because he has like 30 "smart" devices connected to it. A lot of these are ESP32 based I think. My understanding is if you have 1 slow device on your network it can really mess up the traffic of all your other devices.

So this way of receiving my connection to his router via the 3700, then rebroadcasting my own clean and pure 2.4ghz signal in my apartment theoretically I bypass that congestion. For some reason he doesn't use the 5ghz channel at all. Every time I have logged into his router admin page (with permission btw) I never see any connected 5g devices.

Why not just connect directly to his 5g signal? Same issue with the metal objects in the way in the main areas of wifi use in my apartment. Having this 3700 setup will allow me to place it in an unobstructed location.

I will update you guys on whether or not this continues to work, etc. Thanks for the help so far. The WDS would be pretty cool, but I need to read up on how to set that up, looks a bit more complicated.

EDIT: So apparently his router is MediaTek based chipset, so WPS is out of the question.

But so far this setup has been working great! It's way better than I even it expected to be. If it continues to work I will use it with this setup and not get a 30' ethernet cable.

Thank you all for the help!

[dd-wrt_wifi_bridge]

So it was working GREAT for 6 days, then tonight I was playing some CS:GO and about 10 min in the connection cut out. My wife in the other room said her connection cut out. Cannot see that any settings have changed. Can connect to the 3700 OK and access web UI, and the router is maintaining its link with the main router, but it doesn't seem to be passing any internet through.

I was also looking in the main router and saw a TON of these in the log:
all from different IP addresses stretching back into yesterday.

[DoS attack: ACK Scan] from source: 52.74.206.62:80 Saturday, October 29,2022 19:53:30

Not sure if it is related but I'm starting to wonder if I even want to be on his network. My opinion of the 30 or so chinese ESP32 "smart" devices is pretty low and I suspect those things are mining any data they can collect in the house. IDK maybe I'm just paranoid but anyway the router bit it today.

TL;DR:

1. Router worked perfect for 6 days
2. Played 10 min of online game on Steam today, it crashed.
3. Also noticed a frickton of DoS ACK Scans on main router this connects to.
4. Not sure why it's not working now.

Is there something I am missing here? The issue seems to be the DNS. If I connect my laptop to the dd-wrt 3700 it receives an IP address from it, shows the Gateway and DNS is the Main router in house but if I try to ping an external IP address or load a web page it loads and loads then times out.