Not so much for troubleshooting as for technical info.....
I've been struggling with how to get my office at the far end of the house linked by high speed network to the router at the other end of the house where the DSL Modem and router are physically located. We moved here to the Central Oregon Coast last March and I thought it would be simple as I had easy access to the open joists below the room where the phone service comes in and runs across to the place where it stubs up into the wall to serve the existing installation in the living room above.....more on this in a moment.
The original network consisted of DSL broadband distributed wirelessly through the house by a single Linksys WRT54Gv6 router (which came with the house) physically located at the desk in the front room where an iMac (which also came with the house, but now lives in Kingman, AZ with my wife's Mom -- another story there) and printer were located....and there was no office to serve at the far end of the house. For a single user, this was a great setup.....and then I bought the house and my wife and I (two very active users both using later model Intel Mac laptops) needed two workstation positions, thus the office at the other end of the house. I had two network printers to accommodate (one at each desk) plus a simultaneous dual band Time Capsule to add to the mix now and originally thought that I would locate the TC in my office in the back and simply use WDS (Wireless Distribution System) on the 802.11g side of the TC to link the two devices to provide for wireless Time Machine backups while also allowing wireless printing to the second network printer physically located in the back office.....and I failed miserably because the WRT54Gv6 firmware wouldn't play nice with the Time Capsules' WDS as implemented by Apple. It was enticingly close, but I couldn't use the Linksys as the master to extend using the TC using 802.11g......the TC wanted to use 802.11n!!!
So then I thought I would simply run a Cat6 ethernet cable from one end of the house to the other through the easily accessible floor joists in the utility room beneath the living room.....unfortunately, that's the ONLY unfinished access in the whole house and to pull Cat6 through 50 feet of finished ceilings in the basement was a show-stopper.
So there was my situation.....two work stations not physically linkable without major construction (or routing the Cat6 through the wall to run it exterior and then back through the wall....not a positive option, either). With the original factory firmware in the Linksys it wouldn't serve as a WDS master to properly tie the Time Capsule into the same WiFi network....and swapping roles, with the Time Capsule serving as master, wasn't an option as the WRT54Gv6 didn't have WDS as part of its' firmware suite.
Enter
DD-WRT, the ultimate solution to using existing hardware without having to purchase any more wireless gizmos.
FIrst, a little historical background on the WRT54G.....early versions came with larger capacity RAM and NVRAM installed and they ran embedded LINUX for their OS. This made them pretty popular with the folks who like to tinker inside LINUX gizmos and there sprang up a good sized following to that effort....now let's slip forward in time to MY version 6 variant of the WRT54G and take stock. The v6 is known as a "neutered" router in that the RAM and NVRAM onboard are much more limited (thus the size of the firmware installed is more constrained) and the OS is now a much smaller and more restrictive to modification VXworks. It really requires tight coding to pack a reasonable feature set onto this version.....and that is what the nice folks at the DD-WRT project have accomplished. It took a full day of research to ensure that the correct path was followed (WAY MORE INFO on the
DD-WRT home page than you can easily digest in one quick pass), but at the end of the day my Linksys WRT54Gv6 "neutered" router held a new third-party open source firmware install which allowed me to successfully configure the device as a fully stable 802.11g WiFi bridge connecting my back office wirelessly to the Time Capsule in the front room now serving as the master router distributing my network.
It is secured using WPA2 and has a very good throughput (at 40' through three framed/plaster & lathe interior walls). I'm more than satisfied with the end result.
...now if I can just resurrect that WD Mybook world 2TB NAS and get it onto the network as well.......
