Question About using a WRT54G as an Access Point ?

[stingray230sx]

I have a friend with a nice garage, he has ran one ethernet cable to it from his home office router setup, which connects his home/garage camera system to the web.
he has found that the garage is blocking the wifi signal from his office router and makes it impossible to connect to his tablet or laptop.
it was recommended that he add an access point, but we fear the lack of signal will not let an "extender" work well.
So my question is if i use an wireless router configured as an access point, plugged in to the ethernet cable to broadcast the wireless inside the garage can i still connect the cameras box to one of the ports on the access point[old router] as a passthru, or does that feature go away once configured as an access point.
thanks

 

[punkncat]

Oh my goodness...I cannot think of the software (hack) name that works so well with those LEGEND WRT54G to do this. For some reason tomato is sticking in my mind but don't think that is the complete name/picture of what I am thinking and my brain is mush right now. Dangit!

 

[kanewolf]

I have a friend with a nice garage, he has ran one ethernet cable to it from his home office router setup, which connects his home/garage camera system to the web.
he has found that the garage is blocking the wifi signal from his office router and makes it impossible to connect to his tablet or laptop.
it was recommended that he add an access point, but we fear the lack of signal will not let an "extender" work well.
So my question is if i use an wireless router configured as an access point, plugged in to the ethernet cable to broadcast the wireless inside the garage can i still connect the cameras box to one of the ports on the access point[old router] as a passthru, or does that feature go away once configured as an access point.
thanks

Sure the ethernet ports will work with a router used as an access point. The WRT54G is a really old device. It will be disappointing as an AP, but it will be functional.

 

[Unolocogringo]

Oh my goodness...I cannot think of the software (hack) name that works so well with those LEGEND WRT54G to do this. For some reason tomato is sticking in my mind but don't think that is the complete name/picture of what I am thinking and my brain is mush right now. Dangit!

Tomatoe works for some models.
I use DD-WRT flashed to 2 models.
Make sure of the version number before flashing.1.0,1.1,1.2,1.3 and 1.4 models were made.
For light traffic they still work great.
I use different channels for different routers in my home.
Set main router to channel 1.
second to channel 6.
Third to channel 11.
The bands are far enough apart to not interfere with each other.

 

[bill001g]

Can you not find anythings that is even slightly newer. Using "g" for wifi is going to be very slow compared to more modern stuff. 802.11g came out more than 20 years ago. It will function if you just want fairly basic web page access.

 

[BFG-9000]

HyperWRT was the original open-source firmware project after Linksys released the source code for WRT54G under GPL. Its successor was Tomato and the latest actively maintained fork of that is FreshTomato. Only the mini builds will still fit as the device only has 4MB of flash.

More limiting are the 10/100 ports. Yes, the ethernet ports on an AP all work (and Tomato even allows you to designate the 5th WAN port as just another LAN port too) but everything will be limited to 100Mbps. The other thing is the MIPs CPU is slow--if you have a 200MHz model, that is only fast enough to do WPA2 encryption up to 40Mbps at 100% CPU load, which is a reasonable match for Wireless-G. However the v1.0 and v1.1 models only had a 125MHz CPU which would top out around 25Mbps.

There's obviously no hardware acceleration for WPA2 which came out years afterwards, so it has to be done in software.