Wireless repeating with the Netgear DG834Gv3 and WG602v3
Got a wireless network? Need to extend the range to cover that other corner of the house/garden/shed? Been thoroughly hacked off with trying to get what should be quite a simple thing working properly? Yup. Me too...
This is what we have and what we want to do: I'll discuss the Netgear DG834Gv3 and WG602v3 as those are what I've used; your mileage may vary with different devices. The DG834G is a wireless router with built-in ADSL modem; I have version 3 and you'll need recent firmware (I've used v4.01.28) for this form of 'Wireless Distribution Services' (WDS) to work. The WG602 is a wireless access point; I have version 3 and again you'll need recent firmware (I've used v1.2.5).
Network summary
Lets say you want to have a setup like in the diagram below, with the DG834G connected to the internet and all the other devices able to feed off it. By that I mean each of the laptops and the WG602 can connect to the DG834G and share the internet connection. There's also a desktop that has ethernet but no wireless card so we plug that into the WG602. Because we want maximum flexibility, we want one or more laptops to be able to connect to the nearest wireless point to benefit from the best signal whilst sharing that internet connection. And because we value the contents of our computers (or pay by the megabyte for the internet) then we want to encrypt the whole thing as best we can to ward off unscrupulous individuals who may wish to share the connection without our permission...
With me so far? Good.
One method that works...
The only system I could find that fitted (almost) all the above criteria, was that of 'Wireless Repeating'. Not Point-to-Point Bridging (with that the laptops can only associate with the WG602 not the DG834G). The counter-intuitive bit that had me foxed for a while was that you need to tell the DG834G and the WG602 to repeat with each other. The 'almost' in the above sentence is because with the current firmware versions this only works with WEP encryption, which everyone knows can be cracked by a determined hijacker. This doesn't, at the time of writing, work with WPA.
Firstly set this up without encryption, MAC address filtering and the like. Those bits can be added later; you need to start with a clean slate. Set the name (SSID) of the wireless network the same on both the DG834G and the WG602.
Set the 'WDS Mode' on the DG834G to 'Enable Wireless Bridging and Repeating' and select the radio button 'Repeater with Wireless Client Association'. On one of the lines for the remote MAC addresses underneath, write the MAC address of the WG602.
Set the 'Access Point Mode' on the WG602 to 'Repeater with Wireless Client Association' and on the line underneath for the remote MAC address put in the MAC address of the DG834G.
Basically, that's it. I never thought this would work because if both the DG834 and WG602 exclusively talk to each other then it wasn't obvious to me how the laptops would access anything or how the desktop would be able to access the internet... Judging by the various questions that come up on the Netgear forums regarding this though it seems I'm not the only one who wanted this to work but couldn't get it to. If this article helps just one person, it was worth writing.
Loose ends
As I said above, get this working with no encryption first and start from the simplest setup possible. The only encryption that the DG834G supports with repeating is WEP, so we might as well go with 128bit encryption. Test it with a really simple encryption key that you can't fail to type in wrongly, before immediately changing that to a properly random key.
I then set up access controls based on MAC addresses to only allow authorised machines to access the network. Finally, I turned off the SSID broadcasting on both the DG834G and the WG602. Both these are 'security by obfuscation' steps, which are not really security, but will stop Fred Bloggs next door from 'seeing' my wireless network appear automatically on his computer as an available network to use.
Thanks for reading. Hope this helped. Any questions are welcome by email or in the Netgear forums where I (occasionally) post by the name of 'BenCarpenter'.
