I'm trying to build a repeater station.

My unit has 2 wireless cards, wlan1 and wlan2.
wlan2 is the backhaul radio which connects to the head-end. wlan1 is the AP which clients are suppose to connect to. eth1 is the ethernet port which the person hosting the repeater station can use to surf the internet.

I have wlan2 set up in station mode and it communicates fine with the head-end. It is set to a static IP of 192.168.100.210/22.

eth1 has a static IP address of 192.168.2.1/24, a simple srcnat to masquearde it, and a route of 0.0.0.0/0 to route everything out over wlan2.

All of that works.

wlan1 is set up as an "ap bridge" and my netbook's wireless sees it.

I tried creating an ordinary bridge (bridge1) and added ports wlan1 and wlan2 to it. However, my netbook can't get a an address from wlan1 and so doesn't connect.

So then I tried setting wlan1 to IP address 192.168.100.209/22, and adding a DHCP relay to it. Now I can get an IP address, but I can't get through wlan1 to the rest of the network.

What I need is for wlan1 to be on the same network as wlan2, and to transparently pass traffic NOT for eth1, between it and wlan2. In essence, I want to mimic an ethernet switch with one side connected to my "gateway" (head-end), and the other side connected to the clients. If this were a wired connection, I'd simply create a bridge and add both wlan1 and wlan2 to that. However, this doesn't seem to work when I'm using wireless.

Could I get some clear, step-by-step instructions on how to set this up?

The head-end has to be AP WDS, your wlan2 has to be station wds, your bridge could be rstp and include ports wlan1 and wlan2.
Besides, at head-end, AP WDS has to go in an RSTP bridge with wichever interface you get to the Internet.
That how it works for me!

The head-end is not Mikrotik and I'm not about to change a dozen radios up there to make this work.

The head-end is using just normal 802.11a radios in AP mode which bridge between their radio and ethernet sides. To be precise, the one I want to connect to happens to be a Tranzeo TR5PLUS.

See Wiki for Transparently bridging two networks, that should be enlightning

I already looked at that before my first post. It describes what you were describing in your previous email, creating a bridge from 2 radios, an interesting concept for sure. I'm just trying to create a bridge across one board.

Bridge won't work unless you use WDS.
If you can't use WDS, use EoIP. Also at Wiki.

I'm paraphrasing from the manual: "All 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g client wireless interfaces (ad-hoc, infrastructure or station mode) do not support bridging because of the limitations of 802.11".

A possible workaround for your scenario would be to use 'station pseudo-bridge' instead of 'station' for wlan2, provided your running routeros 3.x, before you add the interfaces to the bridge. You can read about the limitations in the manual: http://www.mikrotik.com/testdocs/ros/3. ... reless.php

You can also check out the very last post in this link: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?p=1371789

Cheers.

Thanks,

That looks to be exactly what I'm looking for. I'll give it a try and let you know how well it works.

So here's how it's set up:

Security profile is set up.
wlan2 is set to station pseudobrdige.
bridge1 is created.
ether1 is added to bridge1
wlan2 is added to bridge1
IP address is added to bridge1.
Tweaking a bit of the security profile finally gets wlan2 to connect.
Yes, it works.
wlan1 is set to ap bridge
wlan1 is added to bridge1
EeePC can't get an address
Set EeePC to a static IP address.
EeePC connects to wlan1 and I can surf the internet.
Almost exacly what I want, but it's something I can live with.

Congrat, I'm happy that you are successful with this at last. Pls I want to know what you did exactly at the security profile. The step-to-step set up pls