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WDS Tutorial (2x RT-N66U) with Tomato Shibby 115

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shrewd1983

New Around Here
Hi all, WDS can be tricky to setup for a lot of people, so I thought I would share my setup which I have used for almost a year. It is completely stable, my WDS covers a distance of 20 metres, ~230Mbits/s between routers is easily achievable, this would be the maximum due to WDS cutting your bandwidth between links in half.

Items needed:

PC (DUH)
Extra network cable for easier setup, trust me, well worth it.
Tomato firmware

Step 1

Reset both routers to their default configuration, if you are currently on Tomato this can be easily done from the Admin / config screen:



Select thorough, hit okay, and the router will reboot. Do this on both!

If you have not done so, now would be a good time to upgrade to 115 available at http://tomato.groov.pl/ . I would stay away from the AC branch, I found it to be unstable and I could not achieve a 450mpbs connection between links.

Once both configurations are wiped, reboot the routers again. This is important, don't ask me why, you can read about this further the Tomato main page. Do not make any configuration changes!

Ensure you are connected only to one router, do not connect the routers via Ethernet thinking you will be able to configure both at the same time after both devices reboot. Both routers at this point will have an IP of 192.168.1.1

First thing is to configure our secondary router, this router will hop to your primary router to connect out to the internet, and any devices that are connected to this router will do the same. We need to make a few changes on this device, firstly we need to change the IP.

Log on to the configuration page (http://192.168.1.1 default credentials L: root P: admin) and click the basic menu button on the left, then click network.



Under WAN:

Disable your WAN connection.

Under LAN:

You will probably see 192.168.1.1, change this to 192.168.1.2 or to whatever subnet your network is on, i.e. 192.168.0.2. Also, TURN OFF DHCP, UNCHECK THE BOX, hit ok.

You can go ahead and fill in your default gateway at this point, this is the IP of your primary router or WDS link, usually ending in .1 Same with the DNS.

Scroll to the bottom, hit save, once saving is complete, disconnect your pc from this router, we will get back to it later.

It is now time to setup the primary router.

Connect the primary router to your pc via Ethernet, it does not matter if it is connected to the WAN right now. If you made changes to the subnet on your secondary router, now is the time to change the subnet on this one, log on to the web interface, basic, network, change the IP to the same subnet. Hit ok, hit save, give it a few moments.

Log back on to the interface, now, connect your routers together via Ethernet via the lan ports. You should now be able to access the web interfaces for either router via your pc, if not, you messed up.

Time to configure WDS.



Configure each router like the image above, except for one item, see 'WDS' and then link with? The MAC address of the other router goes in that box, same for the other router. You can find the proper MAC address right below the enable wireless check box, copy and paste this, do not type it. Configure both routers at the same time, do not hit save on either router until you are sure both are configured correctly.

You may use whatever SSIDs you like, make sure they match on both routers however, I used T3 and T3-2 for this tutorial, keep it simple if you can. Same with channels, make sure they are the same.

Moment of truth, quickly hit save on both routers, and then quickly disconnect the Ethernet cable that connects both routers together.

Give it 5 minutes, if you can not access the web interface on your secondary router after 5, reboot both routers by turning the power off and then back on.

It should work within 5 minutes, if not, you have an error with your configuration.


[SUM] 3.0- 4.0 sec 27.1 MBytes 228 Mbits/sec
Done.

The above is an iperf test between a pc on one side of the WDS link, and a pc on the other wide of the WDS link, enjoy.

I choose to use 5GHZ because it is less congested.

Hopefully I didn't miss anything :) Sorry if spelling / grammar is crap, English is not my cup of tea.
 

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