# E2000 as repeater??



## pohlevj

Helllo all,
I recently purchased a Netgear R7000 which I now use as my primary router. All is good with it but I want to extend the range of my network for the other side of the house using the old router (Linksys Cisco E2000) as a, probably wired, repeater. I have seen forums that say you can do this but many of them are conflicting with one another about which way is the best. Ive heard that installing dd-wrt FW is a good idea, but that it can possibly brick ur router. If dd-wrt is a good idea, should i do it to one, or the other, or both?? Any help would be great.

Justin


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## Agoniizing

Welcome to OCN







I use Tomato on my router, but I've also used dd-wrt in the past and both are good. If you want you can just put tomato or dd-wrt on the router you want to use as a repeater. Do you have experience with flashing routers?


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## Dopamin3

A _repeater_ rebroadcasts a wireless signal. You want to use it as an _access point_ if you are running a cable to it. On most Linksys routers this should be pretty straight forward. You don't even need to use third party router firmware.

Assign a different IP to your Linksys router manually in the same subnet, like 192.168.1.2 and keep the router 192.168.1.1. Turn off DHCP in the Linksys box. Set the wireless to the same SSID, encryption type (like WPA2 or WEP) and password. Boom, you're done. Now devices that go in range will connect to it on the wireless end, but your Nighthawk will still be responsible for assigning addresses from DHCP once the clients connect.


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## beers

^ to add to the above I'd change the channel on the secondary AP to one of the other non-overlapping channels for 2.4 GHz (1,6 or 11). Also you'll be strictly using the LAN ports of the secondary device.


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## pohlevj

i have a little experience with routers in general but i have never flashed a router with FW other than stock. Any suggestions or what to avoid?


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## beers

You can do this with the stock firmware.

There's a detailed DD-WRT guide for your router here:
http://dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linksys_E2000


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## pohlevj

I think I am having trouble because I might be doing things in the wrong order or something. I initially setup the nighthawk with IP 192.168.1.1 and the E2000 with IP 192.168.1.2 but now I am in the nighthawks settings and it assigned the ".2" to my imac. Then my internet just froze up because it must be conflicting IP addresses or something. I've heard there is a way to get around this. Should I assign the E2000 an IP of sometihng like .99 just so its completely out of the way of the others? When this happened it actually froze up the network so much that I needed to do a hard reset on the nighthawk. I know this isn't a difficult task to accomplish but the E2000 is certainly giving me a hard time.


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## beers

You should be able to adjust the DHCP pool on the Nighthawk to be a range of something like 192.168.1.100-250 or similar.
That would leave you room at the bottom of the subnet to assign other devices like the other AP.

It may be worth rebooting the router once you apply/save these changes so the DHCP server could offer new leases.


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## pohlevj

After several tries I was finally able to get it all working. The biggest problem was in order to gain access to the second(repeater) router's ip address to make changes, it required the use of the Cisco Connect software. So I ended up having to disconnect and reconnect the different routers each time I wanted access to each one. Definitely a pain in the butt, but I did get it all working and it works great. Thanks for the help Beers.


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