How to setup OpenWRT as a WiFi bridge 2023 edition
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ค. 2024
- A 2023 guide to creating a WiFi bridge with OpenWRT on an old TP-Link router. This guide will work for any router, and it's a great way to repurpose your old router or network hardware and replace a network cable!
00:00 Intro
00:15 Connecting and resetting the Router
00:57 Downloading and installing OpenWRT on your router
04:13 What is a WiFi Bridge and when is it useful
04:49 Setting up a WiFi bridge in OpenWRT
For this video I used a TP-Link TL-WR1043N/ND v2.
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So my most popular video (150k views and counting) is on how you can set up OpenWRT as an Access Point. I will be updating that 5-year-old video, but I first wanted to make a vid on how you can create a WiFI Bridge using OpenWrt and old hardware. OpenWrt is supported on more than 1100 devices, so even for new hardware, this might be a great solution for you! A WiFi bridge can replace a network cable in situations where you have none. Did I go out and shoot a router on a bridge for this thumbnail? Yes, I did. Enjoy the vid!
Thank you very much for this video. Should I use this method or the WDS method? Currently using WDS as it didn't need me to download the relayd package. But maybe I should?
Your instructions worked perfectly and were simpler than any others I found. Great video!
Awesome! Mi router 4, installed OpenWRT and followed your instructions. Works great!! Just what I needed! Subscribed! Thanks!!
Excellent guide. Worked perfectly for me to repurpose a Netgear AP WAC104 that didn't have a bridge mode option with the stock firmware. Thanks!
0:09 - nice, a custom made wife-dungeon in the garden!
Like it a lot!
Thanks for the tutorial; I needed to stick a wired device onto my network that was far from my router and this did the trick. Only thing I would tweak in your tutorial, is to instead make the OpenWRT's LAN interface IP address to be on the same subnet as your home router. This allows you to still connect to OpenWRT after the relay is being used.
Thank you.
Bravo! An excellent video!
Nice handy lil video 👍💐
Thank you so much for this tutorial
Tried it on my LinkSys ea6350-v3 router, and it is working flawlessly. The default firmware of the router was unable to connect to my 5GHz wifi router. But OpenWrt with this method did the trick.
Made an OpenWRT Wi-Fi client using an old Astaro ASG UTM110/120 hardware. These things dating back from the early 2010's still are up to the job with the latest ( 23.05.2 as of end '23 ) firmware OpenWRT has to offer.
Excellent guide, thank you ❤️
Thanks very much for this! I was pulling my hair out trying to get this working, so that I could WiFi enable my wired network printer.
Installing the relay software was the missing piece for me! I thought bridging alone would have done the job, but apparently not!
Thanks! it was nice and easy to follow
You saved my day! Thanks!
Thank you so much!
Excelent tutorial my brother, now i find some use to na old WR941 that’s laying around here. Greetings from Brazil.
Good luck on that approach, sir! Note that for TP-Link WR941ND for example 18.06.9 r8077 is the last supported version according to OpenWRT Table OF Hardware.
Thank you so much for the tutorial!! But if I can't connect to 192.168.1.1 how can I configure the system again if I want to?
Thank you :)
THANKS GUY !!!!
bedankt maat
I was trying for a while to add a secondary wireless router (Tp-Link TL-MR3420) on my home network. But nothing was working. I did try WDS but the secondary router was unable to get IP from the DHCP server (primary router VX420-G2h) or able to assign IP to the connected hosts.
So, I upgraded the firmware from Tp-Link to OpenWRT for more functionality. I configured everything as it should be but got the same issue.
Then, I found your video and followed the instructions carefully and finally I was able to setup secondary router on the network wirelessly.
Although, I had to manually install the luci-proto-relay package through SSH.
However, I can remotely reach out to the hosts (ESXi) connected to the secondary router through ethernet cable from my other devices connected to my home WiFi.
Just have minor concern that I can't reach to secondary router interface (GUI), so to access it I have to manually change the router IP to the secondary router in order to access it.
Everything is sorted now. Thanks for this video.
I once somehow manages to use the WAN interface and declare the WiFi connection to the main router as WAN.
WAN was a DHCP client on the main router.
The LAN interface was then connected to the WAN.
I left DHCP active on the OpenWRT router and clients could connect to the LAN interface.
Disadvantage: This is a different network with its own SSID and credentials an at overlap spots devices could jump between the two.
how will change default mac on openwrt in my 4c rowter
My Firewall settings (at 9.11) dont have a green lan zone with both lan: and wwan: in it. I'm struggling to create that zone... anyone got any tips?
Exact same issue
I had the same issue because I tried to first use an OpenWRT guide.
The fix is to go to the settings for that Interface, click "Firewall Settings", and change it to the "lan" firewall-zone.
if anyone wondering, when he is creating the wireless network interface and types his passphrase he cuts the video, you need to select "lan" in the firewall dropdown, otherwise it will not give the "lan wwan" option when creating the relay_bridge
Great video. Worked fine. But i cannot reach the devices behind the bridge. Is this expected?
Hi. Ik kijk je video!
@MarkVletter, thank you for posting. Would you have any insight as to bridging IPv6 in openwrt?
I would really like to see that updated video for an ACCESS point. I am trying to do this on OPENwrt 23.05 and finding it very confusing.
Hi, thanks for the tutorial, it worked fine and i get a good lan signal, however i also need a 5ghz Wireless signal to connect my Vr headset to my pc, i did manage to make a wireless 5ghz network and i can see it on my devices with Wlan but whenever i try to connect to it its stuck at connecting to ip and ip not found, is there a fix for this? i would really appreciate some help.
I followed this process with a GL inet A1300. Unfortunately, the wireless client config doesn't persist across a reboot. Any thoughts?
worked
I managed to set it up and it works for me via utp but not via wifi, some help on this?
Hey great guide.
I wanted to do something similar from what you have done, but instead of connecting through Wi-Fi, I wanted to connect my router and access point with a cable, but honestly I'm not even sure if this is possible, if it's, do you know by chance how this would be called? I'm trying to search how can I do this but so far no success.
Thanks, can you also please show the ipv6 config in the wireless bridge mode?
Firstly, this doesn't yet work for me. I think it's because my main router (DHCP server) assigns a specific IP address to the access point that I'm setting up as a bridge. Secondly, why would I use this procedure instead of OPENWRT's inbuilt WDS functionality, i.e. I set up one AP's wifi network as mode "Access Point (WDS)", and set up the other one as "Client (WDS)?
Does this result in a true bridge? Or is the router still doing some sort of proxy arp (virtual mac) proxying mac addresses from the wifi network to the ethernet wired network and vice versa? Sonething tells me without WDS or 802.11s, this isn't going to yield the same result as a true bridge. But I hope I am incorrect.
Thanks for this. I tried to follow the openwrt wiki (with no success). The one part that might have been skipped over (and tripped me up) was setting the newly created wwan interface to the LAN firewall group
whats the difference between repeater and bridge ?
Hello Mark, can you tell me which directory icons/Thems you use at "1:44"?
And which software at "3:35" to wiew the "Trackers & Ads Blocked", "Bandwidth Saved" "..."? thx.
That's not a theme 😅 I just wanted something clean and collected these icons over the years. As for the browser it's Brave. Not a big fan of the company behind it but the browser is nice.
Have a question about this. The setup with your tutorial worked well for me. However, one thing unfortunately does not work. I have a small Proxmox server running on a adapter that runs OpenWRT via LAN. When I look at my main router in the network connection, it does not find the device shares unfortunately. When I connect a laptop I can access the internet without problems, but the device on the LAN behind the AP is not found in the network (intranet).
I'm having the same issue. Did you ever figure out the solution to this?
Thank you for your guide
In this video you showed how to get signals from wifi router and bridge them to Lan, my question is that, is there any way to share the received internet to another device by wifi (not Lan)?
Yes that's possible. In that configuration it's called a WiFi extender or WiFi repeater. You will loose a lot of speed.
openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/relay_configuration
@@MarkVletter But what if my internet is only 10mbps anyway? And what if I use the
2.4ghz radio to connect to the main router and the 5ghz to broadcast a new AP?
There are no docs on how to make a WiFi Bridge anywhere. There's a close one for connecting to a hotspot, but that didn't work for me. I wanna use the GUI, not some CLI commands for this, so I know what's going on. Thanks for your guide!
I use this if there's an Internet issue, or I'm messing with cables. It lets me use a Raspberry Pi to connect to my phone's mobile hotspot and that connects to WAN2 on my router (using a VLAN through 2 switches) as a failover.
Bedank maneer😊
So was I supposed to change the op address or let my router assign the bridge one? I ended up losing access to openwrt when I assigned the bridge a static op myself.
First of check your subnet mask and set it broad enough to be able to reach the device. If that does not solve it try the following.
After you change the IP of the router, disconnect your computer from the existing network. Than connect the bridge to your computer via a cable and give you network device a static ip in the same range as you have set for your device. Hope that helps.
I wish I could keep the same subnet
Using the Raspberry Pi 3 B+ for this.
Do you know if there are different steps if setting it up without connecting to the main router by ethernet cable?
I don't think any of the settings itself change. I think most devices send out a default WiFi signal after reset as does openwrt. So I would focus on the settings part of the vid, not the "how to connect to" part.
I'm in the same boat. I was looking to setup a "wireless" bridge. Followed all the steps (or so I thought) but now after the reboot... I can access my device's GUI. I tried using WireShark but I just get a "Timed Out" every time I try to ping any relevant IP address. Anyone have any ideas?
I'm running FriendlyWRT on a NanoPi R5S. I was hoping I could just do a factory reset like you could do with a router, but this technically isn't a router and I think the mask button is only for upgrading the software. I think my only option now is to download the proper firmware for the R5S and re-flash it. That is... unless anyone has a way of saving my a$$??? LOL!
I’m stumped. Whenever I try to change the IPv4 address to something outside of my existing router’s range (192.168.1.1) I can no longer load the interface with the new IP I set… (192.168.10.1). No matter what I try, I can’t seem to fix this!
First of check your subnet mask and set it broad enough to be able to reach the device. If thaf does not solve it try the following.
After you change the IP of the router, disconnect your computer from the existing network. Than connect the bridge to your computer via a cable and give you network device a static ip in the same range as you have set for your device. Hope that helps.
Does this automatically reconnect if the wifi goes down for some time?
Yes
Not every router is able to act like a layer 2 Wifi bridge. It's depend on the capability of the used chipset. As an example, a Linksys wrt1200AC could work as a WLAN client, but it's impossible to forward layer Frames between the swiched ethernt ports and the virtual wifi client port. DHCP frames or broadcast frames will not bridged over the payload network. This is a limit of the used NXP marvel 88Wxxxx chipset, that the router familiy uses.
If layer 3 routing is possibe - well i had not spend the timne to checkout them. If this is possible, the OpenWRT needs to use a dhcp-relay agent on the client edge. I am unknown, if this is available as a module.
oh man, thanks for this note. I've been beating on my wrt1200AC trying to get this to work. I actually lose LAN connectivity to it right after I make the bridge. I've been about to toss it in the garbage for the last hour, and you've given me the thumbs up to do just that!
@@paulcarboneNY I had checked the OEM firmware again and this is able to act like a wifi ip-client. Act as a bridge working on layer 2 is impossible reasoned by the chipset limits i descripted before.
OpenWRT is quite unhandy in the variant for this router, because this models are not build by using more ram and flash memory to implement more.
I prefere using the DD-WRT fork because it's easier to extend them.
@@DD4DA I think I'm starting to see some issues with my setup - any tips on picking the right router to make sure it can do Layer 2 routing between interfaces?
my router stops communicating after i install luci-proto-relay and reboot. ideas?
Can you be more specific on the "stops communicating"?
@@MarkVletter i figured it out minutes ago actually.
Relayd needed to be installed first, but that wasnt the main issue. I had to set the LAN on the PC in the same subnet as the router for it to get into the UI of the router again.
Ever connected a usb printer to the router?
I cant get the pc to find the printer. I keep seeing commands noted but i dont know where to type them in. P910nd print server
@@95GTSpeedDemon have not tried that yet. And glad your found it!
Can you consider making a video on keep alive scripts vs watchcat for wwan offgrid folks like us...Thanks and regards👍💐
Sorry that's too far of my expertise.
Sorry for commenting twice, looks like youtube deleted original comment because of ip addresses I wrote here.
Thanks for the video! I'm new to the OpenWRT and it's a bit more confusing to set up, although more flexible then stock firmware.
So what I needed originally was kind of WiFi "extender" because the signal from the main router is too weak and unreliable.
I managed to set up OpenWRT router to connect to the main router via WiFi as a client, but also to create it's own WiFi network with different SSID. It's set up kinda the same as in the video but Wireless-to-Wireless interface instead of Wireless-to-cable. And it works great, I can even access main router's control panel through this new WiFi network by typing 192,168,0,1.
But what's really needed is a way to access OpenWRT router's control panel. I'm wondering, is there a way to set up some kind of static address like 192,168,0,50 or 192,168,1,1 to access OpenWRT control panel when using WiFi connection, without cable?
What you want is to setup OpenWRT as an access point (extender). I'll make a separate video about that, including setting a static IP.
8:30 relayd
This seems to have bricked my router 😭😭
Every time I follow your steps the router becomes unreachable after de reboot after installing the luci proto relay pkg. No way to access the router from there on and I have to reset the router all over again. Not a 100% correct tutorial.
Have your checked your subnet?
As someone who was setting this up and relied on this youtube video today, these are bad instructions. Device isn't discoverable on network, other connection issues. For just internet access it works, but otherwise people would be best served by following the WRT Relay instructions because this guide clearly gets some steps wrong.
Zoom it plzz
The correct spelling is OpenWrt (capital W, capital O).
Thx. If you look at their own website title they use all caps but in the page and logo its capital W and O. I'll see if I can do an update in the future!
@@MarkVletter Thanks for your response! Where on the OpenWrt website do you see all caps? Can you please provide a link? I'm an OpenWrt team member and would like to get that corrected :)
@@tmo26 the page title of the main website. If your Google OpenWrt it's the first Google hit.
I am sorry, I am very upset with your "explanations" you made it impossible.
Agreed, not a logical progression, ended up losing access to admin page.