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Wifi to ethernet
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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If you've got a spare router laying around; you can probably flash DDWRT, OpenWRT or similar to it, then use the wifi on it as a client-bridge. Does exactly what you asked for: connects to wifi and bridges the lan ports to that connection.
I used to do this at LAN parties almost 15 years ago. I know for sure DDWRT will do it.
I've got a spare router lying around. I'll give this a try.
Make sure to use a WDS bridge if supported, rather than some workaround DD-WRT offers, or putting everything behind yet another NAT and separate network.
WDS is what DDWRT uses for wifi client bridging. (it's mentioned on the first page of the link i provided)
Except client bridge which is a sort of a workaround: https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Client_Bridge
Ah, I see. It's been a long time since I dove into this....
OP will probably want to use plain Client Mode then. Same thing, but a bit more stable and with an extra NAT.
Not really a big deal unless you need clients on the primary network to reach the services on secondary network. Then you've just gotta be aware of the extra NAT and the port forwarding required.
Don't bother with ddwrt since it is really behind the curve.
OpenWRT is where its at but you need to proper hardware
After running DDWRT for years on my old router, I completely agree with this. The worst was googling tutorials to do something on the router and everything always referencing OpenWRT.
And you can most likely still create a VAP on it to act as WiFi extender.
I've used one as a VPN client this way. Connect to WiFi network, connect to Mullvad using Wireguard, create virtual access point and it semi-practically worked.
Semi, the WRT160NL couldn't really handle it. Especially after adding a separate guest network with another VAP. Crashing like every 3 minutes. It can realistically only act as either a WiFi client or single AP.
But that is device-dependent. This is an old trash.
I've been failing at doing this for some weeks now.
I've been using openwrt for years so I thought this was going to be super straightforwad, but it seems like I can't just bridge the wlan and the lan after the wlan is setup as a client.
Is there a guide of some sort for it?
I'm not familiar with OpenWRTs setup unfortunately.
DDWRT makes this super simple: select wifi mode 'client bridge', provide SSID+Auth. Lan is now bridged to wlan. No double NAT.
Hmm yeah, that sounds like I was expecting to be able to do, I'll give it another try later, maybe I can install ddwrt? I'll look into it, thanks!
What does the topology look like?
I would use 802.11s for the back plane
It's pretty simple, I just need to connect a camera to the wifi, but the camera doesn't have wifi. I have something a bunch of wifi access points running openwrt, then I want to basically add a wifi client that shares the network through a wire.