Linksys WRT54G Router As A Wireless Bridge

So you’ve got an Ethernet-capable device (like an xBox 360)  that is too far away from your broadband router to connect directly and you don’t want to spend 80 bones on something like a Microsoft xBox 360 Wireless Networking Adapter. You’re just geeky or nerdy enough to be dangerous [not only do you not mind a little command line stuff, you actually like it] with computers and home networking and maybe you’re even the “go to guy” that friends and family call on when they need some work done on their machine. Restore to a prior point and clean off all of that spyware crap and they think you’re a genius.

If this comes close to describing you then chances are good that you’ve got a lot of components in a box at the bottom of your closet, or in a deep drawer in a desk or all over the house in “touch it and die” caches. I’ll clean it up soon, thweet thweet, I promise. Love you! ♥

Search your stash and drag out that old Linksys WRT54G router that you replaced long ago and do what I did; Remove the stock firmware, install DD-WRT and configure it to work as a wireless bridge. If successful, you’ll save yourself some cash, have some fun and reinforce the feelings of those that revere you as a geek.

Credit where credit is due goes to a YouTube user named whitehatconsulting and of course to DD-WRT.COM.

whitehatconsulting’s video is good and even though I readily acknowledge that I would not have attempted this task without it, the tutorial has some problems. He fails to explain that you may need to turn off the software firewall in Winblowz [cough] Windows and he breezes too quickly through the TFTP and the finalization sections.

Here’s the video:

TFTP or Trivial File Transfer Protocol is a way to transfer files to a device or directory from a command prompt within windows. DD-WRT’s documentation explains that TFTP, or TFTP Flash as it’s referred to, is not really needed in order to successfully install their firmware on a router, but it did seem to work well for the guy in the video and once I did a little more research and became edified via trial and error, it worked perfectly for me as well.

You need to already know how to bring up a command prompt and how to change directories. Once you’re there, here’s what the command string will look like:

To keep the string short, it’s best to set your command prompt in the same directory that you’ve temporarily placed the binary file in. I’m super lazy, so I placed the file in “C:” and set the command prompt in that directory. The X’s in the example will be replaced with the specific version of the binary file that you are using. In my case it was dd-wrt.v24_micro_generic.bin

-i specifies the transfer mode. Following that is the IP address of your router (it may be different than the example).

Once you figure out the TFTP stuff, it takes seconds to do.

Once you get this far are able to bring up the DD-WRT interface, you’re almost home! The last step is to assign the device an IP address and set up the wireless security to match the settings of your primary router. I have many devices that connect to our router at home; As many as 3 PC’s, my HTC Cell Phone, a cell phone booster, a Wii, 2 Nintendo DS’s, and now a wireless bridge. In order to reduce the potential for an IP conflict and since the router is set up to assign IP addresses to devices via DHCP, I set a static address on the bridge as 192.168.1.9.

This entire process took about 3 hours. If I had another WRT54G to set up, I could do it in 30 minutes. If you follow instructions better than I do and if you know more than I do about this stuff, you’ll do fine. Be warned, however, that it is VERY possible to brick your router if you do something wrong. If you try this and it goes horribly wrong, blame George W. Bush, not me. -Matt

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