Wireless Bridge Question

Hi all,

I have a quick question - I currently have a cable modem running through a cheap ($20) D-Link 4-port wired + 802.11b wireless router - It is the only router I have currently, but it works fine for my 3 machines.

Now, my brother is going to be staying for a while downstairs and he uses Macs. But b/c of walls and such, the wireless signal only works in the middle of the house - not all the way down where he'll be staying. I've read that I could get a pair of Linksys WRT54G routers and "bridge" them - likely with some of the free firmware.

My question is this - if I "bridge" the routers - can he plug 1 or 2 macs into the wired ports of the destination router and ALSO use the wireless component of that same router to connect his Mac based laptop? Is this reasonably straight forward to do with the custom firmware?

Second, do the newer Mac OS versions (10.4, right?) also support WPA so that I can keep my network secure?

Does anybody see any problems with this setup? It would be great to extend the LAN w/o cabling - Particularly since I don't think that his needs will be very intensive.

Lastly, is there any reason to instead buy WRT54GS routers for this application instead of the WRT54G version? I don't currently have any other "SpeedBooster" clients - Would the two routers themselves "talk" at a higher rate?

Thanks.

-Katabatic

I have not used any of the custom firmware, but from general experience, a wireless device cannot function as both a bridge (client) and an access point simultaneously.

If his wireless mac can receive signal from the source router, then you could setup both the destination router (in bridge mode) and the wireless mac as both clients of the main router. Really all this buys you is the ability to connect the 2 wired clients to the remote bridge.

But you cannot have the destination router as both an bridge and an AP.

What you want is possible, however your router must support WDS (Wireless Distribution System). I have a year-old SMC router and it supports it. What this does, is that it makes your router act as a wireless repeater, so that it takes the signal of the main router and re-broadcasts it.

Good luck!

Besides making an AP a repeater it also makes it a bridge with WDS. So you could run wireless and wired clients off the WDS Child. The Child would associate to the "parent" bridge.

Seems like a pretty big expense for a temporary solution. I'd probably look for a cheap 802.11b DLink AP that has a repeater function. You won't find a WDS 802.11b AP (That I've seen anyway) so you must use same Mfg, in your case DLink. But this solution would cost you 20 or 30 bucks for the AP plus a wireless client card for your brothers machine if he doesn't already have one, another 20 or 30 bucks.