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[Help] OpenWrt wifi to ethernet repeater (linux.community)

submitted 1 day ago by mat@linux.community to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I recently moved to shared housing and they have a very poor Wifi 4 router located quite far from my room (no chance of wiring ethernet). As I'd like to host some (local) services for myself, I brought a Tp-Link Archer C6 (v3.2) with me to mess with. I had set up WDS successfully on the stock firmware to get a much better internet connection in my room,, but it was finnicky and sometimes drop out entirely for hours. As I knew my router has good support from OpenWrt, I decided to flash it tonight and "quicky re-do the WDS setup". It's been over 5 hours and I've had no luck getting it to connect following the wiki's guide. I also tried making a relayd-based access point, but it doesn't seem to route to ethernet and when I tried connecting with my phone it just stays on "Obtaining IP address..."

I feel very much out of my depth.. is there an easier way to achieve this? Basically, my ideal end result would be having a better/more consistent wifi connection (which I think works because the router has much stronger antennae than my laptop or phone) and ethernet, with OpenWrt available to toy with and learn more about networking.

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[–] ptz@dubvee.org 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I did that with a GL.iNet travel router after flashing stock OpenWRT, and used it as a wireless bridge for several years. It uses relayd to bridge the Wifi station interface and Ethernet. Once you have an ethernet bridge, you can connect another AP or do whatever from there.

If you create a second wifi interface in AP mode (in addition to the station/client one connected to the upstream), you should be able to add that to the LAN bridge alongside the ethernet interfaces. That bridge will then be part of the relayd bridge, and it all should just work (should, lol. I haven't tested that config since I only needed to turn wifi into wired ethernet with this setup).

Interfaces:

LAN Bridge: Ethernet interfaces to be bridged to the wifi

I have both of its interfaces in this bridge, and it also has a static management IP (outside of the WLAN subnet). This management IP is a static out-of-band IP since the devices connected over ethernet won't be able to access it's WLAN IP (in the main LAN) to manage it. To access this IP, I just statically set an additional IP on one of the downstream ethernet client devices.

The LAN bridge is in a firewall zone called LAN.

WWAN: Wireless station interface that's configured as a client to the AP providing upstream access. I have this configured statically, but DHCP is fine too. Firewall zone is WLAN.

WLANBRIDGE: The relayd bridge (Protocol: relay bridge). It's interfaces are the LAN bridge and the WWAN interface.

Disregard the WGMesh parts; that's separate and not related to the wireless bridging mode.

[–] mat@linux.community 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

I've tried to match your setup, but to no avail.

Interfaces:

lan

Static address (192.168.2.1) Firewall zone: lan

wwan

Static address (192.168.0.211) Device: phy0-sta0 (listed as the client in the dropdown) Gateway: 192.168.0.1 Use custom DNS servers: 1.1.1.1 (using root router's IP causes DNS to stop working) Firewall zone: WLAN

repeater_bridge

Relay bridge Relay between: lan wwan Firewall zone: unspecified

Firewall zones: lan ⇒ WLAN accept accept accept WLAN ⇒ lan accept accept accept

With this, I am able to ping google.com from a openwrt ssh session, but not my laptop connected w/ ethernet (and a static ip). In the interfaces list, lan is green, repeater_bridge is grey, and wwan is red. I tried running /etc/init.d/firewall stop but still no luck.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Hmm. Is the upstream AP some kind of fancy deal or a run of the mill consumer router?

I've seen some Cisco APs configured to not allow multiple MAC addresses from the same station. Caused problems when trying to do VMs on my laptop that had the network in bridge mode.

Are you able to put your phone into hotspot, connect to that instead of the upstream AP, and see if it works?

[–] mat@linux.community 0 points 11 hours ago

It's an ordinary consumer wifi 4 router (by a company named Renkforce). I was able to use WDS with it previously, but I haven't got it working since flashing openwrt, which is why I was trying relayd. A hotspot from my phone works (but is really slow obviously). I suspect something is wrong with my interface or firewall setup, given the colors of the interfaces.