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I want to connect my device that only have a rj45 port for wired ethernet. I have several wireless routers at hand, from several manufacturers (dlink, TPlink, etc)

My plan was to connect the device using: wired device -> wireless router ethernet port -> wireless router wireless interface -> wifi

Unfortunately none have the minimum hardware to support either openwrt or dd-wrt. If any supported openwrt or other linux variations, i would connect the wireless interface of the router to the existing WIFI, bring up a new subnet on the wired ports and start a DHCP daemon, and route the traffic there to the wireless interface. Easy enough.

Is there any way to do that via the manufacturer stock firmware?

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    So you want to turn a spare WiFi router that's laying around into a sort of "make shift" WiFi NIC? Can any of the routers you have act as wireless bridges/repeaters? Also, you might want to mention which models you want info for, DLink, TPLink, etc. covers a few thousand models of wireless/wired devices each with a (usually) different firmware.
    – txtechhelp
    Jul 11, 2015 at 6:44
  • With factory firmware, it's easier to disable the DHCP of such a wireless router, and keep everything in the same subnet. Otherwise you would be trying to use the WAP as a wireless bridge, and that's typically not an option with factory firmware. Why do you need an additional subnet?
    – sawdust
    Jul 11, 2015 at 9:14
  • @sawdust the subnets are not a problem. did i mention subnets? all i want is to have the AP to connect as a client to a wifi network.
    – gcb
    Jul 17, 2015 at 23:17
  • @txtechhelp good point. will update the question with the list of routers i have there.
    – gcb
    Jul 17, 2015 at 23:17
  • "did i mention subnets?" -- Yes you did, and enforced that idea by also mentioning DHCP, i.e. "bring up a new subnet on the wired ports and start a DHCP daemon". Did you forget what you wrote?
    – sawdust
    Jul 17, 2015 at 23:28

1 Answer 1

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One easy way to do this is to plug in your access point as you wanted and keep it as an access point. Then have another computer which has Internet access connect to it through Wi-Fi. From a layer 3 perspective, the access point will be acting as the client now. Connect your computer to the access point, and then enable packet forwarding (routing), and a DHCP server on it. Of course you'll want to disable the DHCP server on the access point. Edit: I should point out that your existing router will need to support adding custom routes to its routing table. Your link between the computer and the Wi-Fi access point will be using a different subnet, so your computer that's acting as the router will need to be added as a gateway that handles that subnet. Netgear and Linksys have been good about supporting this option. Other brands like Dlink may not. If you can't add a custom route, then your computer that's connecting to the access point will need to do NAT routing (giving you double layer NAT!) or run a proxy server.

Basic 802.11 networks are not fully Ethernet compatible since they do not keep the Ethernet frame source and destination MAC addresses separate from the MAC addresses used to identify the radios in the wireless frame. Since the source MAC address is shared with the source wireless transmitter MAC, this prevents the source MAC address from being changed, which is required for Ethernet bridging. This is why you can't bridge wireless networks. To get around this, support for 4-way mac has been added to GNU/Linux. Other Wi-Fi manufacturers may call this feature WDS. The reason why I'm saying this is if you buy one of those Wi-Fi extenders, or devices that are supposed to let you plug Ethernet in to a device that acts like a Wi-Fi client, it likely won't work unless your Wi-Fi access point supports a feature like WDS.

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