I’ve been thinking about redesigning my home’s network infrastructure for a while now and Cyber Monday gave me a nice opportunity to grab some cheap WiFi devices. It was time to replace my obviously oversized Netgear VPN router in combination with a Linksys WAP54G access point. To have everything combined in one device, that was the goal. And this goal was reached – almost.

Two Buffalo WHR-HP-G300-NG routers were the deal I took on and they arrived pretty soon. I’m very, VERY familiar with WRT routers, or let us say DD-WRT itself, but these two Buffalos cost me nerves, if you know what I mean.

I use one router as a router (sure thing) and also as an access point (makes sense). The second router is getting used as an access point in client bridge mode to connect my media centre with the rest of my network. I unboxed the devices, switched them on, ignored the standard firmware and instantly flashed the recommended DD-WRT firmware.

This is where the real struggle began. First router worked perfectly fine so far. WiFi signals was kind of awesome and connection speed itself also improved. I configured the second router and nothing was happening. Client bridge mode was not working.

I checked my settings and everything seemed okay, actually, everything was already alright. While researching and debugging I got a connection out of nowhere. I was happy and almost ready to get some sleep. Well, I had a connection for like five minutes and everything broke down again.

A week of research followed. I’ve found one workaround, which was to run my client bridge router in client mode only. That helped to get rid of the fitful disconnects. I also found one DD-WRT firmware version that was able to keep the connection even in client bridge mode but disconnection followed after almost an hour and the router completely crashed.

Meanwhile, I replaced the second router with my old Linksys access point that handles the client bridge mode perfectly well. Connection on my media centre is fine and my buffering problem is also solved. So here comes the second issue.

One of my smart phones  has got a problem with the WiFi. It is connected, but it is not able to connect to the Internet. Strange, totally strange weird too. Well, my client bridge problem is not solved actually and I’ve got a smart phone that can no longer connect to the Internet. Leads me to the conclusion, never change a running system.