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Bridging two routers with repeating mode

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felixdd

Occasional Visitor
QUESTIONS:
1) In a repeater bridge scenario, is it possible, feasible, advisable, or necessary to have the host router provide the wireless backhaul through a virtual wireless interface (e.g. guest network)
2) In a repeater bridge scenario, is it possible, feasible, or advisable to have the repeater router broadcast a second virtual LAN with the same band and SSID as the backhaul?
3) In a network architecture with a single host and a single repeater, is a repeater setup essentially the same as WDS?


FOR CONTEXT:
Scenario
- Modem upstairs along with host router (AC68U on Merlin...I'm running Diversion adblocker and ASUS ddns so don't want to change this much).
- Ground floor repeater will be DIR880L on DDWRT.
- Ground floor, backyard, frontyard insufficient coverage from either 2.4 or 5GHz bands from host router.
- Single (HTPC) computer on ground floor without wireless capacity (and I want to be able to wake-on-lan) -- hence bridge mode needed.


Plan
- Plan is to set up a "guest" 5GHz WLAN on the ASUS with MAC filtering on and SSID broadcast off -- therfore, the only client that can connect will be DIR880L, and maintain a backhaul through 5GHz AC)
- DIR880L will repeat by 2.4GHz, through its wl0 native radio.
- DIR880L will also repeat a 5GHz through its own virtual interface.


The reason for all this:
- I can't get WDS to work (even though both have essentially identical broadcom CPU and wireless chipset, down to the model)...but on second thought not sure whether a 2 node system really requires WDS.
- This way clients can still use 5GHz AC to connect to host router.
- When signal to 5GHz/5GHz AC to host becomes too weak, clients have the option to switch to 2.4GHz from host/repeater, or 5GHz/5GHz AC from repeater.
- By specifying a separate SSID for backhaul, I avoid the situation where the backhaul and the virtual 5GHz broadcast on the client router would have the same SSID.
 

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