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I travel a lot, and at a sale I found a used Asus RT-N12 D1 router for $10 so I picked it up with the thought of making it a WiFi client since many of the hotels I stay at have, lets just say, less than exceptional WiFi coverage.

My thought was to flash Tomato or DD-WRT and set it up as a WiFi client, hoping that with the antenna it would pickup WiFi signal better than my laptop, then just plug my laptop in to the router with an ethernet patch cable and bridge the signal though.

I was able to flash Tomato (Shibby Max) successfully, I set it up and tested it at home as a normal router and it functioned fine, but the option to set it up as a WiFi client is grayed out and cannot be selected.

My question is, am I missing something? There isn't a lot of documentation on setting this up, so I am kind of playing it by ear. Is there some pre-requisite feature I need to enable or disable before this feature is active and usable, or is this just not possible with Tomato and the RT-N12 router? Or would I be better off just to flash it to DD-WRT and would that give me the ability to do what I am looking for?

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3 Answers 3

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On the RT-N12 (D1) running Shibby, this is how I got wireless client working:

Advanced - Virtual Wireless Interfaces: Click "eth1 (wl0)" to edit, and change the mode here. I also added SSID of host network here.

Go back to Basic - Wireless. Wireless Client should now be enabled. I was able to change the host SSID here as well. Now configure the security settings to match your host network, should be good to go.

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In Shibby's recent builds, an additional drop-down box exists in the Basic > Network > WAN Settings section. Below Type, which is normally set to "DHCP" in this configuration, is Wireless Client Mode, which needs to be set to "2.4 GHz / eth1" (or whichever combination of frequency & interface you wish to use.)

This allows you to set Wireless Mode to "Wireless Client" further down the page in the (matching frequency & interface's) Wireless section.

My guess is, this mechanism is to prevent the user from setting more than one interface into client mode.

Important: When configuring Tomato as a client, click every available drop-down box in the Wireless section, in order from first to last, even if you wish to keep the current setting! If this is not done, it is possible to select an invalid configuration which will prevent the connection from working - even if it seems like it shouldn't make a difference. An example of this is having the Security option set to "WPA2 Personal" prior to switching to wireless client mode. Only "WPA / WPA2 Personal" is available in wireless client mode, but the setting does not change automatically. As a result the client router will be unable to authenticate, even when WPA2 is the only allowed method on the upstream router.

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Using RT-N12 D1 in client mode with my laptop connected via ethernet cable right now. I get a stronger signal from distant routers using repeater mode, but WPA seems broken as does MAC filtering (in repeater mode), so I'm having relatively good experiences in client mode as a compromise, for security reasons.

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  • Umm... OK... How, can you elaborate or at least tell me what firmware and some basic steps? I am a network technician, so if you just point me in the right direction I'm sure I'll figure it out. My problem is the client options are all grayed out and not selectable.
    – acejavelin
    Apr 11, 2016 at 3:47

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