Has anyone used this? It's a Linksys product, so there's bound to be some frustration, but I'm having the darndest time setting it up. I didn't get it for myself, but I recommended it for someone else and I'm trying it on my own network to see if I can do it. The thing is, I'm sooo close, but I can't seem to get over that final hurdle.

I'm following this guide, since I don't want to run the wizard which doesn't seem to work anyway. I've done what it says, and the link light on the extender is blue meaning that it can finally see my router. I can also connect to either my router or the extender (and see their setup screens while connected to either one) without setting a static IP. The problem is, when I'm connected to the extender, it can't connect to the internet, and I can't access my router's setup page. When I'm connected to the router, I can access the internet, and when I go to the extender's IP to try and see its setup menu, it takes me to the router's setup menu.

So, at this point I am quite confused. What the heck is going on? I was working on this for something like 4 hours last night, and I'm obviously up late tonight trying to figure it out. I'm certain it's something little and stupid, but I can't figure it out!

Thanks for any help you can give to end my insanity.

What are the IPs you've assigned to the router and the extender?

The extender is actually just an access point bridging to the router using WDS. A WRT54G would do the same job.

Ah. Go to administration and turn off the loopback feature. Not sure why but I've found it to be really buggy and breaks lots of stuff.

Thanks, I'll give that a shot when I get home.

I disabled the loopback feature, but it's not working. Now I can't get into the expander's admin page even when connected to it, and still when I'm connected to the router and browse to the expander's IP, I get the router's admin page.

This is far too difficult to set up. I hope he doesn't mind returning it if I can't get it to work.

Weird. The loopback thing is supposedly only for debugging and configuration.

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Enable / disable the loopback interface. The loopback interface makes your internal clients appear as if they are external. This is useful for testing things like DynDNS names. The loopback is an option because enabling it will break PPTP and Windows machine browsing by wireless clients.

I've found it always breaks stuff when enabled like slimserver and DNS. Everything appears to be coming from the router itself which makes stuff go strange.

You've got the MAC addresses entered on each side properly in the WDS screens?

I'm pretty sure I do. The router has a page where you can enter about 15 MAC addresses. I've entered the MAC Address for the expander and the supposed 192.168.1.240 IP into that, and on the expander's setup I've entered the router's MAC and IP address (192.168.1.1).

Thanks for your help, Trevor. I finally got the thing working. And in case anyone else ever gets one, here's what I did: (the router has to have the Sveasoft firmware to do this manually)

-connect your wireless NIC to the router
-went into the router admin, wireless > WDS
-this is where I went wrong. instead of P2P, I had to enable one of the WDS fields for LAN. Then just put in the MAC of the extender
-connect your wireless NIC to the extender
-go to the extender's admin, put in the info for the router including MAC
-done

Question: The one thing I'm not certain about is this: should the SSID on the extender match the SSID on the router? I wasn't sure if they were supposed to look like one network or if you were supposed to connect to one device or the other.

Thanks, Tom. I'll just leave them with the different SSIDs I set them up with. It doesn't bother me.

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And thankfully, the default SSID isn't something generic like "Linksys".

Ugh, I hate that. I had to do some sleuthing to find out which network belonged to this family I was helping. The houses weren't right next to each other, but apparently were close enough to have identical signal strengths, and the Windows utility for picking networks is terrible.

If you want to use WPA with WDS then it has to be the same SSID.