My Network setup for getting bridging my internet connection from my barn, to my house (barn has broadband access, house doesn't)
Cable Modem
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WHR-HP-G300N (Labeled Barn) (attached to Hawking outdoor Omni 9dBi HAO9SIP)
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(via WDS)
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WHR- HP-G300N (Labeled House) (attached to Hawking outdoor directional 14dBi HAO14SDP)
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Clients
Both G300N's are running DD-WRT v24SP2-EU-US (8/19/10) std - Build 14998
Getting WDS running was difficult, but in the end, the configuration I found that worked was setting the Barn router to:
- Mode: WDS Station
- Network: NG-Mixed
- SID: XXXX (identical to House router's SID)
- Channel: Auto
- Channel Width: Quarter (5mhz)
- Under the WDS tab, I have entered the House MAC address as a "LAN" entry and enabled Lazy WDS.
- Security is set to WPA2 Personal, AES
- Under the Setup-Advanced Routing tab, Operating mode is set to Gateway.
For the House router:
- Mode: WDS AP
- Network: NG-Mixed
- SID: XXXX (identical to Barn router's SID)
- Channel: Auto
- Channel Width: Quarter (5mhz)
- Under the WDS tab, I have entered the Router MAC address as a "LAN" entry and enabled Lazy WDS.
- Security is set to WPA2 Personal, AES
- Under the Setup-Advanced Routing tab, Operating mode is set to Router.
This setup worked to get WDS rebroadcasting from my house-based clients to the Barn and out to the internet.
First issue:
The setup seems to work just fine, but then it dies somewhere around 12-24 hours later. The main symptom I am seeing is the Status-Wirless page reports the wireless connection has the same signal strength as is usual on this link (9%-12%), but I am not able to ping the Barn router which sits at 192.168.11.1. If I reboot the barn router, it comes back up and now the packets will route just fine. Any ideas about what is causing the failure, or what I can try to fix it? It doesn't seem related to the key rotation rate, as suggested in another post. On both routers it is set to 3600. I don't want to disable this because I am putting out a pretty good signal that anyone could grab.
Second Issue:
I'd like to let wireless clients connect up to the Barn router, but if I change the Barn router to WDS AP, although clients can connect, the link between the routers no longer appears on the wireless status page. If I remove the encryption, then the WDS AP setting will work and I get the clients in the barn to connect and the house, but no encryption. Known bug? Any way to work around? For now, I am going to put one of my old G54 routers wired into the Barn G300N to give the barn wirless coverage on a different channel/SSID. If I change the Barn router to just AP, I get the same result.
By the way, I am not looking for amazing speeds here, but would rather have a rock-solid connection. The pipe out of the barn is only 10mb on a good day, so anything more than that is wasted. Setting the channel width to 5mhz seemed to make the signal strength a little better, but when I analyzed the signal spectrum using inSSIDer, the channel width appeared to be the full size. I am not sure where the error is here, either in the measurement or the router's respect of that setting.