Modding my router into a client

[Augmented Husky]

Alright so when I had constructed my desktop setup I had to settle with using a USB adapter which had a bad habit of over heating and disconnecting in order to stop it from frying itself. Luckily my dad had just a week after this received a bandwidth upgrade with BrightHouse (now acquired by Charter) to 150Mps because lucky us he works for the company and gets a sizable discount  and doubly good news is they gave us a router/model combo unit to get full advantage of the speed, and this also means the router it replaces is the WD N600 I bought myself a few months earlier. Before that it was a old "g" only Netgear router which my parents never bothered upgrading until the frustration was to much with us all streaming Netflix and consequently made the speed across the network suffer so I just bought the new router with my own cash but now I'm getting sidetracked

Anywhose it turns out it was possible to flash the WD router with OpenWRT a custom router firmware so that it can act as a wifi client to my desktop. Which I did get to work however now that the router is between the desktop and the actual combo router this means it can't see other devices on the network to do nifty things like sync my iPhone over wifi, mirror my screen to the Chromecast, Host iTunes media for sharing and so forth. So my question to you guys is what sort of port forwarding trickery would I have to do in order to reach these other networked things ?

Any help would be appreciated

[Augmented Husky]

16 hours ago, 6tails said:

I suggest a primer on routing through various subnets.

Alternatively, change the OpenWRT router's mode to bridge or AP mode and have that router wired directly into the other combo router. That should let you simply connect to the router as a dumb wireless AP at that point.

the subnet routing sounds worth a shot. If you had steps or an link as to how that would really help

Also I should mention that my desktop is on the second floor of the house where as the combo is in a downstairs office so wiring directly would mean getting a professional to drill holes. Which would not be as cost effective to put it mildly.

[Ricky]

OpenWRT is linux based and probably pretty minimal. Some things you are describing might be difficult, but I'm not sure what exactly you have setup, or what you are even trying to accomplish. It sounds like the old router is attached as a device to your network over WiFi, is this indeed the case? If so, you would use the same router that is setup as the gateway for anything WiFi related. You basically turned your old router into a workstation and it won't act as a router anymore.

That said, to interface with devices directly you might have to find the right drivers and then:

> sudo modoprobe

to install them.

[Augmented Husky]

On 6/9/2016 at 5:05 PM, 6tails said:

You can run AP Bridge/Repeater config. You 'll have to set the router to have the same password and SSID and encryption method as the Combo Router. This method will let you do it without wires, however EVERY NEW CONNECTED DEVICE will roughly halve your bandwidth. If you're on a 54mbit G router, just the bridge connection alone puts you down to 27mbit usable bandwidth. Add a Cell Phone, now you've got 13.5 mbit per device.

Turns out when I go into settings it doesn't have that or at least as far as I've seen

On 6/10/2016 at 1:41 PM, Ricky said:

OpenWRT is linux based and probably pretty minimal. Some things you are describing might be difficult, but I'm not sure what exactly you have setup, or what you are even trying to accomplish. It sounds like the old router is attached as a device to your network over WiFi, is this indeed the case? If so, you would use the same router that is setup as the gateway for anything WiFi related. You basically turned your old router into a workstation and it won't act as a router anymore.

That said, to interface with devices directly you might have to find the right drivers and then:

> sudo modoprobe

to install them.

The setup is this basically:   Internet-->Combo-->WD_N600-->ethernet to PC

The objective is for services on my PC like iTunes can see devices connected to the Combo router or connect to my Chromecast

[Ricky]

I don't know if you can even do that and you'd probably have a hard time if you could. Not only would you need to find and compile drivers that work for your kernel, since I'm certain the architecture is different than a x86 intel (if they even exist for that instruction set, RISC or whatever) but you'd also have to install and run the software which would have the same complications if they even have it for Linux in the first place.