Well, many moons ago my dad brought home a Linksys WRT54G, a wireless router with four ports, pictured below. It sat there for months and months and months and I brought it with me when I moved in to my new home.
I had seen plenty of articles on the internet that stated that this 60 dollar router could be upgraded to have the capabilities of a 600 dollar router. "Cool", I said, but I never did it. I kept it in the back of my brain though.
Well, it all came together this weekend.
I was cleaning out boxes of stuff I brought over from my moms house when I moved and I dug out an 80gig HD that Rob had given me for my bday or xmas last year. So when I finished cleaning out the rest of the stuff I put the HD into the HP machine Ive had in my garage for the same amount of time that I have lived here. I installed XP on it and then I had nothing else to do to it. Then I said to myself, if only I could get onto the net with this thing. But i dont have a wireless card to connect to my router, and i dont want to run a long cable from my router to the garage. Then I looked at the Linksys router sitting there and thought to myself, "i should be able to connect to my netgear router with this and then connect the hp to it and get on the net". I did some googling on my phone in the garage and learned that with the Firmware installed on the routher it was impossible to be done.
So then here comes the 600 dollar upgrade.
I got my info and downloads from this site:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/dd-wrtv2/index.phpThey have a cool wiki with all the info I needed.
So I went to my PC in then den and downloaded the bin files. But then how do i get this files on the router? Well, I got geeky here cuz I wasnt about to burn a cd and i didnt have a USB stick. SOO, I downloaded the files. Went back to the garage and since I was already listening to music shared on my PC with my Toshiba e805 I browsed the network to the folder to which I downloaded those files and downloaded them to the PDA. THEN, I disconnected from that network and connected to the wifi coming out of the Linksys and browsed to the HP machine attached to it and copied the files down there... hehe... I thought it was cool. So then I logged into the Linksys router and upgraded the firmware in two easy steps!
When I logged back into the router the configuration screens were all different. I had so many options now. I guess the kind of options a 600 dollar router has. I made my way to the Wireless settings and saw there were options for it to be a regular AP (access point), a Client, a Client Bridge, and AD-HOC mode. I knew it had to be one of the client settings so I went back inside to do some googling.
I found step by step instructions to use Client mode.
here. If you read it, it tells you, arseign an IP on the same subnet as the netgear, to leave DHCP on on the Linksys, to input the Netgears ip as the Gateway, to set the SSID the same as the netgears...things like that. The only way to tell if you are connected to the netgear would be to go to the Status screens and you should see that you are connected to the Netgear router, but I was only able to see them connect one time. Upon further reading I also learned that with this setup I was not going to be able to browse to other workstations on the network. THAT SUCKS, cuz I live by sharing things across multiple computers. So I took a break from that, took a nap, went to church, went to wallbangers, and then finally did some more searching.
The next HOWTO I found explained setting up the Linksys in Client Bridge mode.
here. If you read it it simply tells you to gave the router an ip on the same subnet as the netgear, turn off dhcp, give it the same SSID as the netgear, same encryption settings, and put it in Client Brigde mode.
It was that simple, and VOILA, it worked!! I was now on the internet with the HP machine. So cool. I can visualize a bridge connecting the Linksys router to the Netgear router letting internet traffic travel through both. Very slick, very cool, and very geeky. AND , i am able to browse machines on the network.
My only question is how do wireless devices connect? DO they connect to the Linksys when they are close to that or do they still come to the Netgear? I get a pretty weak signal from the netgear in the garage so i hope it will go to the linksys. I will have to do some testing and some research.
In the Pics below you will see the Router, the PDA I used for the transfer, the HP i used to confgure the router and to get on the net, and my truck acting as a big mouse pad after I came back from Wallbangers. The PC is on the workbench, and the monitor is on a fridge nearby. :-). You can barely see the Linksys router behind the truck sittin on the HP machine on that last pic.
Thats my story.
