DD-WRT setting up WDS with Two Linksys WRT-54GL to WRT-54G

This post is more of a geeky type of post about the awesome DD-WRT firmware. And how I set up two wireless router to talk to each other without wires.

So, yesterday the digiturk web tv set-top box arrived, that my wife purchased for Onur (our son, who is only 1 year old now) to watch “Turkish” television, basically the box runs windows CE and has an internet jack that requires you to plug in to get IPTV from the web.

The problem is that our TV is located on the main floor while our office is downstairs in the basement where all internet connection is located, cable modem with the linux version of linksys wireless WRT54GL to provide wireless to our laptop on the main floor.

Now in order for me to provide internet for this new set-top box I need to either pull an ethernet wire all the way up or use the existing cable coax to the TV and move my modem and linksys upstairs, and I was thinking wouldn’t it be great if I can use my old WRT54G (without linux which I was selling on kijiji, and some guy was trying to offer me $20 bucks for it, glad I didnt take his offer) just plug it up there with the set-top box and have it talk to my linux WRT54GL wirelessly to go to the internet.

So that got me thinking and googling for a solution and I found out about WDS (Wireless Distributed System) and how to set it up.

To get started I flashed my v8 CDFF version of my linksys WRT54G with the dd-wrt as listed here

Once I got that running, I had to flash my WRT54GL with the same dd-wrt, you want to have the same version of firmware running on both.

After that I had to follow this techinque of setting it up for my 54GL router to talk to the 54G router, although that cost me  to go to bed around midnight to get it all working, even though I was proud of achieving it, my wife was like “weren’t it suppose to take only half an hour?”

It always that “geek factor” where you say, just half and hour I will be there and half hour turns to 2 hours later 🙂 But I did go to bed smiling that I got it working, and thinking about what I can do next with it, maybe set up VOIP etc, just need to investigate more into DD-WRT.

Now I just need digiturk to enable my service at their end to let my son watch some Turkish TV, it makes me wonder why would you send a box and not enable the serial number to login to your system, but that’s another story or post for bureaucracy in this world of large co-op, how disfunctional they are.

From all of this my lesson learned is, estimation of hacking/software setup stuff always doesn’t take half an hour 🙂