The D-Link DWL-800AP+ as a wireless repeater to extend wireless range – Part 3
So, now that I was “in” the DWL-800AP+ it was time to see if I could set it up as a repeater. I visited the “wireless” tab of the web based configuration and chose Repeater mode instead of AP mode and saw that I would need the Mac address of the access point that I wanted to “repeat” signal from. In this case it’s the old Linksys WAP11 v. 1.1 So, I opened up a console and (as root) did an arpping 192.168.0.250 (the ip address of my Linksys AP). Got the reply back and typed it in.
The only problem I had here is that I put in colons at first between the pairs of hexidecimal MAC numbers… 00:04:…etc… There should be no seperation… it should be 0004…. etc. 12 digits and hexidecimal digits (includes a-f) only. So, once that was set it looked like it was repeating signal of my Linksys. I opened up my little handheld and it “magically” saw two access points in my Wireless LAN, both using the same channel and the one I was sitting next to had marvelous signal strength.
I’m not done yet though, because at this point I’m not able to ping anything. For a long time I’ve used MAC address filtering on the Linksys as the only real protection. We’re in a relatively isolated area and up until now I’ve risked leaving things open with MAC only filtering. Many times the AP get’s unplugged for periods of low use and given some of the IN house range problems it hasn’t been a BIG concern. (i.e. I’d notice someone sitting in the driveway… and I usually use ssh to encrypt from the laptop anyway…) But, right now that filtering was preventing the repeater from passing signal along to the web/LAN.