this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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[Help] OpenWrt wifi to ethernet repeater (linux.community)
submitted 1 day ago by mat@linux.community to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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I recently moved to shared housing and they have a very poor Wifi 4 router located quite far from my room (no chance of wiring ethernet). As I'd like to host some (local) services for myself, I brought a Tp-Link Archer C6 (v3.2) with me to mess with. I had set up WDS successfully on the stock firmware to get a much better internet connection in my room,, but it was finnicky and sometimes drop out entirely for hours. As I knew my router has good support from OpenWrt, I decided to flash it tonight and "quicky re-do the WDS setup". It's been over 5 hours and I've had no luck getting it to connect following the wiki's guide. I also tried making a relayd-based access point, but it doesn't seem to route to ethernet and when I tried connecting with my phone it just stays on "Obtaining IP address..."

I feel very much out of my depth.. is there an easier way to achieve this? Basically, my ideal end result would be having a better/more consistent wifi connection (which I think works because the router has much stronger antennae than my laptop or phone) and ethernet, with OpenWrt available to toy with and learn more about networking.

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[–] mat@linux.community 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

I've tried to match your setup, but to no avail.

Interfaces:

lan

Static address (192.168.2.1) Firewall zone: lan

wwan

Static address (192.168.0.211) Device: phy0-sta0 (listed as the client in the dropdown) Gateway: 192.168.0.1 Use custom DNS servers: 1.1.1.1 (using root router's IP causes DNS to stop working) Firewall zone: WLAN

repeater_bridge

Relay bridge Relay between: lan wwan Firewall zone: unspecified

Firewall zones: lan ⇒ WLAN accept accept accept WLAN ⇒ lan accept accept accept

With this, I am able to ping google.com from a openwrt ssh session, but not my laptop connected w/ ethernet (and a static ip). In the interfaces list, lan is green, repeater_bridge is grey, and wwan is red. I tried running /etc/init.d/firewall stop but still no luck.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 2 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

Hmm. Is the upstream AP some kind of fancy deal or a run of the mill consumer router?

I've seen some Cisco APs configured to not allow multiple MAC addresses from the same station. Caused problems when trying to do VMs on my laptop that had the network in bridge mode.

Are you able to put your phone into hotspot, connect to that instead of the upstream AP, and see if it works?

[–] mat@linux.community 1 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

It's an ordinary consumer wifi 4 router (by a company named Renkforce). I was able to use WDS with it previously, but I haven't got it working since flashing openwrt, which is why I was trying relayd. A hotspot from my phone works (but is really slow obviously). I suspect something is wrong with my interface or firewall setup, given the colors of the interfaces.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I've always thought the firewall color codes were arbitrary, though I might just have not paid attention all these years lol.

Just to clarify: I meant connect your OpenWRT device to your hotspot instead of the AP you've been working with. Just to rule out multiple MACs being blocked on the AP.

Beyond that, I'm not really able to help troubleshoot further, but worst case and if all you need is internet, you can set your OpenWRT device up so that it just NATs your downstream connections. Double-NAT, in most cases, is fine.