RT-N66U - Bridge Mode Advice needed

[Chaosphere64]

Hi,

in my household I have two RT-N66U units placed on the ground and on the first floor. These units both work in AP mode so far, using the same SSID but different channels (so I have some kind of roaming for my mobile devices). The connection between both is established via dLAN which has become pretty unstable lately, so I came up with the idea of just building a bridge between those two and still having them serve Wifi clients.

But how do I need to configure both units in order to get such a setup? And will such a bridge support WPA2 encryption?

I already found this article on the ASUS support site, but in my case none of the units is supposed to work as a router. One of them has an uplink to my main switch, the other one would have no physical connection to the LAN (but wired client).

Hope you can help me on that matter. Thanks in advance.

 

[Gingernut]

The bridge option is not available on stock Asus firmware, it's possible Asus will support this feature in the future.

You'll need to install on your n66u one of the experimental builds that RMerlin has on his mediafire download site as it's also a feature that's added by RMerlin but not in his normal releases.

When you've got the right firmware installed it's quite easy to set up.

If you have any problems just ask here, I've personally had a n66u wireless bridge working very well.

 

[Chaosphere64]

Thanks for that information. I will try to find RMerlin's special firmware. BTW, what about running Tomato (e.g. Shibby) or DD-WRT on the devices. Would they support bridge mode already?

 

[Gingernut]

Tomato doesn't have bridge mode but I think it can do WDS with WPA2, not sure.

DD-Wrt has various bridge modes but is sometimes not too reliable.

If you want to try RMerlin's build the file you need is named: RT-N66U_3.0.0.4_270.26b-dwrp

 

[Chaosphere64]

Thanks again, will try. Hope that function will make it into the regulars builds from either ASUS or RMerlin.